'I am at your commands, sir, but may I say that it is one of the morning, and the pipes play the reveillé at four?'
'To quarters, then! What is the word, damme? What is the word?'
'Slaint an Righ, sir.'
'Slaint an Righ? I never can get my tongue about it. Oh, if our subjects had but one language and one religion! But it shall not be the religion of Mr. Bunton. Bon soir!'
'You have taken every trick, Wogan!' said Graden, as the Prince entered his inn. 'A sober night, for once, before a long day's march.'
* * * * * * * * *
Next morning the army went south, to Derby, and then (by no fault of the Irish officers or of their Prince) came back again. Wogan was at Falkirk, Culloden, and Ruthven, woe worth the day! How he reached France when all was over, is between him and a very beautiful young lady of Badenoch; she said she bore a king's name--Miss Helen Macwilliam. Of King Macwilliam Wogan hath never heard, but the young lady (whose brothers had taken to the heather) protected Wogan in his distress, tended his wound, hid him from the red-coat soldiers, and at last secured for him a passage in a vessel from Montrose.
And for all souvenir, she kept the kerchief with which she had first bound up the bayonet-stab that Wogan came by, when he, with the Stewarts, broke through Barrel's regiment at Culloden. He writes this at Avignon, where George and his wife also dwell, in the old house with the garden, the roses, and the noisy, pretty children that haunted Mr. Kelly's dreams when he was young.
FOOTNOTES
[Footnote 1]: Sophia, a nickname of the Duke of Wharton.