“Remember you!” he said, seizing my hand, “Oh! I say, what a young beast I was!”
I learned more than once that he and his brother turned out fine, manly soldiers, and did their duty well in that hard-fought campaign. I tried also to do mine, and came back one of the last to leave the Crimea, another grade higher in my rank.
During my college life I often used to go over and see the brothers Brownsmith, to be warmly welcomed at every visit; and if ever he got to know that I was going to Isleworth to spend Sunday, Ike used to walk over, straighten his back and draw himself up to attention, and salute me, looking as serious as if in uniform. He did not approve of my going into the artillery, though.
“It’s wrong,” he used to say; and in these days he was back at Isleworth, for Mr Solomon had entered into partnership with his brother, and both Ike and Shock had elected to follow him back to the old place.
“Yes,” he would say, “it’s wrong, Mars Grant, I was always drew to you because your father had been a sojer; but what would he have said to you if he had lived to know as you turned gunner?”
“What would you have had me, then? You must have artillerymen.”
“Yes, of course, sir; but what are they? You ought to have been a hoozoar:—
“‘Oh, them as with jackets go flying,
Oh, they are the gallant hoozoars,’”
he sang—at least he tried to sing; but I went into the artillery.