“Nothing in life, your reverence, but drinking the health of King Charles in a brimmer, last evening, that was May-day, and a court holyday all the world over; and then the wound in my old head always aches, Parson, and I say more nor I mean, and, may be, louder than your gentles talk.”
“Well, but this is a sorry way of life for an old soldier,—to go about like a vagabond. Have you no home?”
“Home, bless you! none but this old bit of a cloak.”
“What parish were you born in?”
“Ah! there it is! I was born i’ the camp, in the Low Countries. That same day that the most noble Sir Philip Sidney was killed, my mother had a fright from a shot striking the sutler’s waggon, and I came into the world a month before time.”
“And have you no friends living?”
“None in the wide world that care a split straw whether I am above ground or under, this blessed day, save, may be, this little dumb thing that’s used to me.”
“Where did you lose your leg?”
“In the lines before St. Martin, your reverence: it will be thirteen years agone, come next September; and the right-worshipful knight, Sir Joseph Burroughs, was killed by the same shot. We used to say in hospital (you know, your reverence, we were vexed, and it was some of the officers, in their cups, spoke it out of a play-book,)—