Random Shots from a Rifleman

by J. Kincaid

Lord Wellington had thus, by a foresight almost superhuman, and by a rapidity of execution equal to the conception, succeeded in snatching the two frontier fortresses out of the enemy's hands in the face of their superior armies, it gave him a double set of keys for the security of rescued Portugal, and left his victorious army free and unfettered for the field.

We had been on the watch long enough, with the enemy before, beside, and around us; but it had now become their turn to look out for squalls, and by and bye they caught it—but in the meanwhile we were allowed to have some respite after the extraordinary fatigues of the past.

Spring had by that time furnished the face of nature with her annual suit of regimentals, (I wish it had done as much for us,) our pretty little village stood basking in the sunshine of the plain, while the surrounding forest courted the lovers of solitude to repose within its shady bosom. There the nightingale and the bee-bird made love to their mates—and there too the wolf made love to his meat, for which he preferred the hind-quarter of a living horse, but failing that, he did not despise a slice from a mule or a donkey.

Nature seemed to have intended that region as the abode of rural tranquillity, but man had doomed it otherwise. The white tent rearing its fiery top among the green leaves of the forest—the war-steed careering on the plains—the voice of the trumpet for the bleat of the lamb—and the sharp clang of the rifle with its thousand echoes reverberating from the rocks at target-practice, were none of them in keeping with the scene; so that the nightingale was fain to hush its melody, and the wolf his howl, until a change of circumstances should restore him to his former sinecure of head ranger.

The actors on that busy scene too continued to be wild and reckless as their occupation, their lives had been so long in perpetual jeopardy that they now held them of very little value. A rifleman one day in marking the target, went behind to fix it more steadily; another, who did not observe him go there, sent a ball through, which must have passed within a hair's breadth of the marker, but the only notice he took was to poke his head from behind, and thundering out, "Hilloah there, d—— your eyes, do you mean to shoot us?" went on with his work as if it had been nothing.

Whilst on the subject of rifle-shooting, and thinking of the late Indian exhibition of its nicety on the London stage, it reminds me that the late Colonel Wade, and one of the privates of our second battalion, were in the habit of holding the target for each other at the distance of 200 yards.

I cannot think of those days without reflecting on the mutability of human life, and the chances and changes which man is heir to. For, to think that I, who had so many years been the sleeping and waking companion of dead men's bones, and not only accustomed to hold them valueless, but often to curse the chance "which brought them between the wind and my nobility;" I say that, under such circumstances, to think I should e'er have stood the chance of dying the death of a body snatcher, is to me astonishing, and would shew, even without any scriptural authority, "that in the midst of life we are in death," for so it was.

Some years after, I was on my way from Ireland to Scotland, when I was taken seriously ill at Belfast. After being confined to bed several days in a hotel there, and not getting better, I became anxious to reach home, and had myself conveyed on board a steam-boat which was on the point of sailing.

I had been but a few minutes in bed when I heard a confused noise about the boat; but I was in a low, listless mood, dead to every thing but a feeling of supreme misery, until my cabin-door was opened, and the ugly faces of several legal understrappers protruded themselves, and began to reconnoitre me with a strong sinister expression; I was dead even to that, but when they at length explained, that in searching the luggage of the passengers, they had found a defunct gentleman in one of the boxes, and as he belonged to nobody out of bed, he must naturally be the property of the only one in it, viz. myself! a very reasonable inference, at which I found it high time to stir myself, the more particularly as the intimation was accompanied by an invitation to visit the police-office.

My unshaved countenance worn down to a most cadaverous hue with several days intense suffering, was but ill calculated to bear me out in assertions to the contrary, but having some documentary evidence to shew who I was, and seeing too that I was really the invalid which they thought I had only affected, they went away quite satisfied. Not so, however, the mob without, who insisted on being allowed to judge for themselves, so that the officers were obliged to return and beg of me to shew myself at the cabin widow to pacify them.