"Old Blount, the Paymaster-General, furnishes that. So come, rouse thee, friend Basil—let us have a parting glass ere you go, my dear boy."
There was an unmistakeable moisture and sad expression in Tom's clear and usually merry eye as he spoke, for we had ever been the best of friends and comrades.
Within an hour after this I had packed my valise, secured the French colours and the Prince's despatches in a large saddlebag—had bade adieu to our good old colonel,* to Tom Kirkton, Douglas, and others, and departed with sincere regret. Hob Elliot and many of the Greys—braver good, honest fellows—accompanied me to the town gate, and the farewell cheer they gave me as I passed through the Infantry camp rings yet in my ear and in my heart, as it did then when I waved my cap, and said "God bless you!"
* He died at Bath, in 1785, a Lieutenant-General, and still Colonel of the Scots Greys.—Regimental Record, p. 127.
CHAPTER XIX.
IN LONDON AGAIN,
Before I reached England, some changes had taken place of which we had as yet heard nothing in our camps and cantonments in Germany.
The king had died in October; his grandson had been proclaimed by the title of George III., and already the Court was out of mourning, for the new monarch had succeeded a father who had been hated by the late king, and whom he was never known to name or to speak of during the whole of his long life; no one knows why, but so it is, that the memory of Frederick Lewis, Prince of Wales, was speedily committed to oblivion.
After a narrow escape from a French privateer, I was landed by a returned transport at Portsmouth, and travelled post to the English metropolis, halting for a night at the Red Lion at Guildford, where the landlord perfectly remembered the affair of the highwayman in the chimney, and insisted on my sharing with him a crown bowl of punch in the good old fashion, while I fought all my battles over again.
Next evening, without encountering a breakdown of the ricketty vehicle, an overturn on the wretched roads, a masked highwayman, or other adventure, I saw before me mighty London, with the double domes and peristyles of Greenwich shining in the sun, and the old battered fellows who had fought under Anson, Hawke, and Boscawen enjoying their pipes on the terrace; then the glorious Thames, with its myriad shipping, and the flags of all the world (France excepted) flying over them; the vast façade of St. Paul's—the great square mass of the Tower, which made me think of the jewels, the crown, the chains and dungeons of tyrants long since gone to their account, and of that long line of Norman and English kings whom we may still see there, with their wax faces and dusty armour, ranged rank and file in the Armoury.