The hotel was surrounded by a dense crowd, who kept up an incessant cheering, and in the streets the Highlanders were absolutely mobbed. Perhaps it was the first time the Scottish garb had been seen so far south in England, so that, as the London papers said, "the excitement was tremendous."
In every town and village through which they marched on the long route from Dover to Edinburgh, their reception was the same: they were followed by mobs of shouting men and boys, while laurel boughs, and flags adorned with complimentary mottoes, waved from the houses and church steeples. Every inn or hotel at which the officers dined was decorated with streamers and evergreens, and wreaths of laurel encircled every plate and dish on the tables. Each day, during dinner, they were regaled by a concert of thousands of tongues, shouting and screaming, while the bells in every spire rang as for some great national jubilee.
At Lincoln was erected a triumphal arch, which spanned the highway at the entrance of the city. It was composed of the usual materials—evergreens, and such flowers as could be procured at that season of the year,—and was surmounted by the arms of Scotland, of England, and of the famous old ecclesiastical city, merry Lincoln itself. St. George's red cross was waving from the summit of the ruinous castle, and great Tom of Lincoln was sending forth his tremendous ding-dong, deep, hoarse, and solemn, from the Gothic spire of the cathedral, drowning the mingled din of every other bell in the city. The streets were full of enthusiastic people; the windows were full of faces, flags, and the branches of trees. All were in a state of merriment and uproar, while the shrill fifes and hoarse brattling drums, succeeding the fine brass band, made the streets re-echo with 'the British Grenadiers,' the most inspiriting of all our national quick steps.
Immediately within the triumphal arch stood a carriage filled with ladies, two of whom, very beautiful girls, the perfect personification of young English belles, with the cherry lips, and merry, bright blue eyes of the south, held aloft bouquets of roses, procured probably from some hot-house, for at that season of the year they could not have been reared elsewhere. At the moment the ensigns were passing with the colours, the ladies made some sign to Campbell, who lowered the point of his sword in salute, and desired his orderly bugler to sound a halt. Each of the fair English girls, with a white riband bound her roses to the tops of the colour-poles, just below the spear-heads, but not without blushes and hesitation, for the eyes of thousands were turned upon them, and the hearts of the unshaven ensigns were captured on the instant. The ladies managed to say part of some address prepared for the occasion, "regretting that they had not a wreath of thistles to offer, and requesting that the soldiers would carry the flowers home to their own country."
Campbell returned thanks. The ensigns, who, luckily for the regiment, were both very handsome fellows, bore each on his breast the Waterloo medal. They raised their bonnets, and retired to their places in the centre; the music struck up again, and the Highlanders moved forward with the badge of England adorning the shot-splintered poles of their colours.
Of the latter, nothing was left save the gold tassels and that part of the silk which was stitched round the pole, with a few shreds and remnants of embroidery. The rest had all been shot away, or torn to pieces by the rain and wind, by the battles and storms of twenty-one years of continual warfare, in which the corps had borne a distinguished part, since it had been embodied by the Duchess of Gordon in 1794. The appearance of the bare poles attracted universal attention in every town and hamlet. The people were heard to exclaim with wonder, "Look at the colours! look at the colours!" which perhaps they supposed had been reduced by a single volley to the condition in which they then appeared.
The bouquets of the Lincoln ladies remained long attached to the poles, but the first frosty day completed their destruction, and nothing but the stalks were left; yet these still remained when the regiment, after a march of many hundred miles, came in sight of their native country.
Who can describe the wild delight of the Highlandmen, when, from the hills of Northumberland, they beheld afar off the snow-clad summits of the Cheviots, whose sides have been the scene of so many gallant conflicts? A thousand bonnets rose at once into the air, and the "Hoigh, hurrah!" from a thousand tongues made the welkin ring. What a joyous march had been theirs through all merry England! How different in appearance were its cities, its villages, its vast extent of cultivated land when compared with the ruined pueblas and desolate cities of Portugal, or the barren hills and desert plains of Spanish Estremadura. In the former country the soldiers of Massena had scarcely left one stone standing upon another. What a change to these scenes and places seemed the comforts, the luxuries, the happiness of England, especially to those who had been enduring the starvation, the toil, the yearly, daily, hourly danger and misery of continental service! Truly it was a merry march that from Dover to Scotland, and never did private soldiers trudge with their burden of seventy-five pounds weight more contentedly, than the Gordon Highlanders on that long but happy route.
CHAPTER XIX.
EDINBURGH.