I could not help smiling at Mike’s ideas of medicine, as I turned away to talk to the major, who was busily engaged beside me. His occupation consisted in furbishing up a very tarnished and faded uniform, whose white seams and threadbare lace betokened many years of service.
“Getting up our traps, you see, O’Malley,” said he, as he looked with no small pride at the faded glories of his old vestment. “Astonish them at Lisbon, we flatter ourselves. I say, Power, what a bad style of dress they’ve got into latterly, with their tight waist and strapped trousers; nothing free, nothing easy, nothing dégagé about it. When in a campaign, a man ought to be able to stow prog for twenty-four hours about his person, and no one the wiser. A very good rule, I assure you, though it sometimes leads to awkward results. At Vimeira, I got into a sad scrape that way. Old Sir Harry, that commanded there, sent for the sick return. I was at dinner when the orderly came, so I packed up the eatables about me, and rode off. Just, however, as I came up to the quarters, my horse stumbled and threw me slap on my head.
“‘Is he killed?’ said Sir Harry.
“‘Only stunned, your Excellency,’ said some one.
“‘Then he’ll come to, I suppose. Look for the papers in his pocket.’
“So they turned me on my back, and plunged a hand into my side-pocket; but, the devil take it! they pulled out a roast hen. Well, the laugh was scarcely over at this, when another fellow dived into my coat behind, and lugged out three sausages; and so they went on, till the ground was covered with ham, pigeon-pie, veal, kidney, and potatoes; and the only thing like a paper was a mess-roll of the 4th, with a droll song about Sir Harry written in pencil on the back of it. Devil of a bad affair for me! I was nearly broke for it; but they only reprimanded me a little, and I was afterwards attached to the victualling department.”
What an anxious thing is the last day of a voyage! How slowly creep the hours, teeming with memories of the past and expectations of the future!
Every plan, every well-devised expedient to cheat the long and weary days is at once abandoned; the chess-board and the new novel are alike forgotten, and the very quarter-deck walk, with its merry gossip and careless chit-chat, becomes distasteful. One blue and misty mountain, one faint outline of the far-off shore, has dispelled all thought of these; and with straining eye and anxious heart, we watch for land.
As the day wears on apace, the excitement increases; the faint and shadowy forms of distant objects grow gradually clearer. Where before some tall and misty mountain peak was seen, we now descry patches of deepest blue and sombre olive; the mellow corn and the waving woods, the village spire and the lowly cot, come out of the landscape; and like some well-remembered voice, they speak of home. The objects we have seen, the sounds we have heard a hundred times before without interest, become to us now things that stir the heart.
For a time the bright glare of the noonday sun dazzles the view and renders indistinct the prospect; but as evening falls, once more is all fair and bright and rich before us. Rocked by the long and rolling swell, I lay beside the bowsprit, watching the shore-birds that came to rest upon the rigging, or following some long and tangled seaweed as it floated by; my thoughts now wandering back to the brown hills and the broad river of my early home, now straying off in dreary fancies of the future.