"I wish Davie Baird or Lord Paget had been with me to hear all this!"
Mild in face and disposition, though somewhat fierce in temper when a boy, Sir John Moore possessed a figure that was tall and graceful. His features were perfectly regular; his eyes were hazel, and his hair of a rich brown colour. His whole face was expressive of cheerfulness and benignity, save at times when a hopeless or desponding emotion seized his mind. There was a very perceptible scar on one of the cheeks, where his face had been traversed by a bullet when leading on the 92nd at Egmont-op-Zee.
In his holsters he always carried the pistols given to him by the attainted Earl Marischal, when he was present, as a young subaltern of the 51st Foot, at the famous reviews of the Prussian army near Potsdam, together with a pocket edition of Horace bearing the Earl's autograph; and these he valued highly as relics of that sturdy old Jacobite, once Scotland's premier peer.
Moore was now in his forty-eighth year, having been born at Glasgow, in 1761, in a house long known as "Donald's Land," in the Trongate—an edifice demolished in 1854. But to resume:—
After enjoying Quentin's confusion for a moment, he asked—
"Are there any other gentlemen volunteers serving with the Borderers?"
"No, sir, myself only."
"Indeed!—what—are you named Kennedy—Quentin Kennedy?"
"Yes, sir," replied Quentin, faintly, and his heart sunk. ("Oh," thought he, "he has heard of that accursed court-martial—who has not? It is all over with me now!")
"Have you not seen the last War Office Gazette, which came this morning from England?"