THE ROAD.
Power was detained in town by some orders from the adjutant-general, so that I started for Cork the next morning with no other companion than my servant Mike. For the first few stages upon the road, my own thoughts sufficiently occupied me to render me insensible or indifferent to all else. My opening career, the prospects my new life as a soldier held out, my hopes of distinction, my love of Lucy with all its train of doubts and fears, passed in review before me, and I took no note of time till far past noon. I now looked to the back part of the coach, where Mike’s voice had been, as usual, in the ascendant for some time, and perceived that he was surrounded by an eager auditory of four raw recruits, who, under the care of a sergeant, were proceeding to Cork to be enrolled in their regiment. The sergeant, whose minutes of wakefulness were only those when the coach stopped to change horses, and when he got down to mix a “summat hot,” paid little attention to his followers, leaving them perfectly free in all their movements, to listen to Mike’s eloquence and profit by his suggestions, should they deem fit. Master Michael’s services to his new acquaintances, I began to perceive, were not exactly of the same nature as Dibdin is reported to have rendered to our navy in the late war. Far from it. His theme was no contemptuous disdain for danger; no patriotic enthusiasm to fight for home and country; no proud consciousness of British valor, mingled with the appropriate hatred of our mutual enemies,—on the contrary, Mike’s eloquence was enlisted for the defendant. He detailed, and in no unimpressive way either, the hardships of a soldier’s life,—its dangers, its vicissitudes, its chances, its possible penalties, its inevitably small rewards; and, in fact, so completely did he work on the feelings of his hearers that I perceived more than one glance exchanged between the victims that certainly betokened anything save the resolve to fight for King George. It was at the close of a long and most powerful appeal upon the superiority of any other line in life, petty larceny and small felony inclusive, that he concluded with the following quotation:—
“Thrue for ye, boys!
‘With your red scarlet coat,
You’re as proud as a goat,
And your long cap and feather.’
But, by the piper that played before Moses! it’s more whipping nor gingerbread is going on among them, av ye knew but all, and heerd the misfortune that happened to my father.”
“And was he a sodger?” inquired one.
“Troth was he, more sorrow to him; and wasn’t he a’most whipped one day for doing what he was bid?”
“Musha, but that was hard!”
“To be sure it was hard; but faix, when my father seen that they didn’t know their own minds, he thought, anyhow, he knew his, so he ran away,—and devil a bit of him they ever cotch afther. May be ye might like to hear the story; and there’s instruction in it for yez, too.”
A general request to this end being preferred by the company, Mike took a shrewd look at the sergeant, to be sure that he was still sleeping, settled his coat comfortably across his knees, and began:—