With Moore at Corunna

by G. A. Henty

"Quite so, O' Grady; I have had tremendous luck. And it has all come about owing to my happening to think it would be a good thing to take possession of that French lugger."

"Don't you think it, me boy," O'Grady said, seriously. "No doubt a man may have a turn of luck, though it is not everyone who takes advantage of it when it comes. But when you see a man always succeeding, always doing something that other fellows don't do, and making his way up step by step, you may put it down that luck has very little to do with the matter, and that he has got something in him that other men haven't got. You may have had some luck to start with--enough, perhaps, to have got you your lieutenancy, though I don't say that it was luck; but you cannot put the rest of it down to that."

At this moment Dick Ryan came and joined them.

"Well, Dicky," Terence said, "have you had no fun lately in the regiment?"

"Not a scrap," Ryan said, dismally. "There was not much chance of fun on that long march; on board ship there was a storm all the way; then we were kept on board the transport at Cork nearly three months. Everyone was out of temper, and a mouse would not have dared squeak on board the ship. I have had a bad time of it since the day we lost you."

"Oh, well, you will have plenty of chances yet, Dicky."

"It has not been the same thing since you have gone, Terence," he grumbled. "Of course we could not always be having fun; but you know that we were always putting our heads together and talking over what might be done. It was good fun, even if we could not carry it out. I tried to stir up the others of our lot, but they don't seem to have it in them. I wish you could get me transferred to your regiment. I know that we should have plenty of fun there."

"I am afraid that it could not be done, Dicky, though I should like it immensely. But you see you have not learned a word of Portuguese, and you would be of no use in the world."

"There it is, you see," O'Grady said. "That is one of the points which had no luck in it, Terence. You were always trying to talk away with the peasants; and, riding about as you did as Fane's aide-de-camp, you had opportunities of doing so and made the most of them. Now there are not three other fellows in the regiment who can ask a simple question. I can shout Carajo! at a mule-driver who loiters behind, and can add two or three other strong Portuguese words, but there is an end of it. Cradock would never have sent you that errand to Romana if you could not have talked enough to have made yourself understood. You could never have jawed those mutineers and put them up to getting hold of the arms. If Dicky Ryan and I had been sent on that mission we should just have been as helpless as babies, and should, like enough, have been murdered by that mob. There was no luck about that, you see; it was just because you had done your best to pick up the language, and nobody else had taken the trouble to learn a word of it."

"I see that, O'Grady," Ryan said, dolefully. "I don't envy Terence a bit. I know that he has quite deserved what he has got, and that if I had had his start, I should never have got any farther. Still, I wish I could go with him. I know that he has always been the one who invented our plans. Still, I have had a good idea sometimes."