The Commandant sending for me, read my Medical attendant’s letter, and telling me that the Professors thought I should probably fail to get the aggregate number of marks, observed that he was himself leaving the College to assume command of a brigade in Dublin, and as he knew all about me from my two years’ residence at the College, he would be glad to take me as his Aide-de-Camp, whether I passed or not, and suggested I might avoid the worry, and possible annoyance of failure by not going up for the Final Examination. I thanked the Commandant warmly, asking for a fortnight to consider the question of the appointment, but said at once that having looked at a fence for two years, I could not refuse to go at it and cross it, and would sooner fail than not try.

I had a curious premonitory dream in the last week I spent at the College. I thought I knew fairly well the usual questions on Bridging, and had given but little time to it. I dreamt the night before I was to be examined I could not describe General Eblé’s bridges made over the Beresina for Napoleon’s retreat, and getting up studied it carefully, from 1 to 3 a.m. It was the first question in our paper set at 10 a.m.! The Professors were mistaken, and having done better than anyone anticipated in the Final Examination, I went over to Dublin at the end of the year, and joined General William Napier.

The night after I arrived in Dublin I dined at the Mansion House, when discussion was carried on across the table with a gentleman sitting next to me about the Clones agency. It was impossible for me to avoid hearing the conversation, and as a result of what I learnt that evening I supervised for twenty-one years the management of my brother-in-law’s estate, about 9000 Irish acres. Six months later, Sir Thomas Lennard, who had married my second sister, went down with me to Clones, the third time it had been visited by the owner for upwards of eighty years, he having succeeded his grandfather, who lived to be nearly a hundred years old.

CHAPTER XIX
1865–7—“ON THE STAFF”

Recognition of an opponent—A good Veterinary Surgeon—“Vagabond”—Fenian scares—I supervise the management of an Irish estate—Difficulties of marriage settlements—Sir Thomas Lennard—His offer of £5000.

On the 22nd May, when accompanying General Napier, who was inspecting a battalion at Mullingar, my eye rested on an officer whose face I recognised, and when the parade was over I asked him, “Are you the man who fought me in the public-house in Air Street, Regent Street, and gave me such a hammering?” He replied, “I am the man; but I do not admit that I gave you a hammering, for you left me speechless.”

In taking lessons from various pugilists in London, I had gone in 1862 to an ex-“Lightweight Champion,” and after a few lessons I was foolish enough to accept his proposition that instead of paying 7s. 6d. for each lesson, I should pay him £5, and then have as many lessons as I desired. The result was that after I had had two or three lessons, instead of taking the trouble to stand up himself, he invariably set me to box with the first pupil who happened to come in, and thus it was I met the gentleman, not knowing he was in the Army. Though neither of us lost our tempers, we had what was virtually, and is now called, a glove fight, except that our gloves were heavier and better covered.

I suffered so continuously in the summer of 1865 each time I got seriously wet from recurring attacks of fever, which affected my ears, accompanied with neuralgia and swollen face, that I went over to London in July, when my dentist informed me that I should always suffer when ill from other causes unless I had eight stumps of teeth at the back of my mouth removed. I then made a round of doctors’ houses, asking if they would give me chloroform, but they one and all declined, so I went back to Dublin, and asked a physician who had been most successful in treating a gnawing pain from which I had suffered in the stomach, but he, while declining to allow there was any disease of the heart, was not willing to administer to me an anæsthetic, so returning to England I sought out Dr. Nicholas Parker, who had attended one of my sisters. He was himself ill, and had given up practice, but consented to give me chloroform, and, having arranged with the dentist, I went up to London, accompanied by my mother and four grieving brothers and sisters. After a careful examination, Dr. Parker postponed the operation, telling me to come back again in a fortnight. When I returned, the attendant family had dropped to three, after another fortnight to one, and eventually there was nobody with me, when the doctor said cheerfully, “Yes, you are fit to-day; go away and have a good luncheon, for you won’t want to eat much for a day or two.” Since that period, although I cannot say I have been free from neuralgia in the head, I have suffered much less from face-ache.

I accompanied my General to the Curragh in the summer, and there became so ill I was obliged to go away. Doctor Hudson, the Physician of the Meath Hospital, did more for me than anyone else at the time, chiefly by keeping me on a milk diet.