After some little trouble, the pinnace was safely moored alongside, and the old general securely, though with equal difficulty, and a few volleys of abuse to his servants, deposited by instalments on the deck. Here, however, he appeared in some danger of suffocation, from the vigorous embraces of the buxom young widow, who yielding to the impulses of natural feeling, and regardless of standers-by, rushed into his arms, and kissed him with the warmest affection, knocking off his hat by the collision, and exhibiting to our view the generals venerable head, white with the snows of seventy or eighty winters.
Here, then, in the shrivelled old soldier standing before me, I beheld a warrior of the days of Clive, a last representative, probably, of a generation long gone down to the dust, whose thoughts, dress, and manners so essentially differed from our own, and who (all honour to their three-cornered hats and big waistcoats!) had baffled the Indian in the field and the cabinet, and laid the foundation of this proud dominion, on which I was about to set foot. I looked on him with that respect with which we contemplate a grey ruin of other days, with its silent courts, its “banquet-hall deserted,” and all its glorious associations, and which long has withstood the tempests of the world.
General Capsicum on Board the “Rottenbeam Castle.”
After retiring to the cuddy, and some private conversation with his daughter, the general again came on deck, and had a renewed round of handshaking with the captain, and some other of his acquaintance, whom he expressed himself as devilish glad to see in India again, “the best country in the whole world, by all that’s good!” He concluded with a look redolent of gunpowder and hair-triggers, though half jocular, “And where is the man that will say me nay?” It was obvious at a glance the general was what an old Scotch author calls
A fiery Ettercap, a fractious chiel;
As hot as ginger and as true as steel;
with not a little of that refined savageism in him, which exalts the duello into the first accomplishment of a gentleman.
In Colonel Kilbaugh he recognized an old friend and brother campaigner, and right cordial was the greeting between them. A tremendous refighting of battles would then and there have taken place, it was quite clear, had time allowed of it; unless, upon the principle that two negatives make an affirmative, they should have neutralized their kindred fortes. The general, amongst his peculiarities of the old school, swore like a trooper; indeed, so free was his indulgence in that once fashionable, but now, amongst gentlemen, exploded vice, that had he been in England, he would doubtless have been liable to an indictment from the Society for the Suppression of Vice, for profane swearing.
“By G——, you’re looking well, though, Kilbaugh, d——d well, upon my soul; you’ve taken a new laise of your existence since you went home.”