But, gentlemen, if this was the effect produced on our minds by the mere anticipation of this most bitter change in our fate, what think ye was the misery of body which we sustained, and, especially, what think ye was my misery, when I, who never wore aught else but a kilt from the day I was born till that accursed moment, was crammed, in spite of all I could say or do to the contrary, hip and thigh, into a pair of tight regimental small-clothes!—Aye, you may laugh indeed gentlemen—but if anybody was to tie your legs together with birken woodies, as they have tied the fore-legs of yon pouny that you see feeding yonder in the bit meadow at the foot of the brae, and if you were then to be bidden to climb up the steepest face of Ben-Machduie, you could not be more helpless, or more ill at ease than I was. As for drilling, you might as well have set up a man in a sack to march.
“Step out!” cried they eternally—“why the devil don’t you step out?”
But it was just altogether ridiculous to cry out any such thing to me, for fint a step could I take at all, unless they had letten me step out of my breeks.—I was in perfect torture with them.—The very circulation of my blood was stopped—my nether man was rendered entirely numb and powerless. Nay, had I been built up mid man into a brick-wall I might have stepped out just as well.
Now, I would have you to understand, gentlemen, that especially and above all things, the confounded articles grippit and pinched me most desperately over the henches. The joints of my henches were so bound together in their very sockets by their pressure as to be rendered altogether useless; and the torture I endured in these quarters became so great, that I felt I could bear it no longer. I sat down, therefore, to hold a consultation with myself what was best to be done; and, after as cool and calm a consideration of my lamentable case as my extreme state of misery would allow, I came, in my own private council of war, to the determination, that I had only three things to choose from, and these were,—to desert—to cut my throat—or to cut my breeches; and, after having much and duly weighed these different evil alternatives, I finally resolved to adopt the last of them.
Having come to this resolution, I then began, like a skilful engineer, narrowly to examine the horrid instruments of my sufferings, in order to ascertain how and where I could most easily make a breach in them, and one that was most likely to give the greatest ease to myself. A little farther thought and observation soon convinced me, that, as the parts most grievously afflicted, were those which your masters of fortification would have called the sailliant angles of my henches to right and left, and especially as on these hinged much of the motion of the whole man, it was clear that the proposed attempt to work myself relief should be first tried in those two points. I lost not a moment, therefore, in carrying my plan into execution. I immediately borrowed a pair of shears from a sodger’s wife; and, sitting down regularly before my breeches, like an experienced general about to besiege a fortress, I fairly attacked the two sailliant angles of the bastion, and carried them by storm; and having, with the greatest nicety, cut out a round piece of the cloth of three or four inches in width, directly over each hip-joint, I ventured to thrust my limbs within the very garrison of my breeches; and really, gentlemen, the ease I obtained in consequence of this bold operation is not to be described.
So innocent was I, and so utterly unconscious of even a suspicion that I had done any thing wrong, that when the drum beat, I went off to the private parade of the company I had been attached to, with my heart almost as much eased as my henches; nay, it was absolutely bounding with benevolence, and brimful with the earnest desire and intention of spreading the blessed discovery I had made, and making it widely known among my Hillant comrades, so that all of them who might be in the same state of misery as I had been, might forthwith proceed to benefit themselves, as I had done, by the bright discovery I had made. Rejoicing in my ease, therefore, I strode across the barrack-square, with a step so much wider and grander than any I had lately been able to use, that I felt a pride in the excellence of my invention which I cannot possibly describe. I halted for a moment—stretched out, first my right leg, and then my left, just as I have seen a fowl do upon its perch—and then, clapping my hand upon the new made hole on either side of me, I chuckled for joy.
“Hah!” cried I; “breeches do they call you? By my faith, then, but I have made you more like your name by these well-imagined breaches of my own contrivance, which I have so ingeniously opened through your accursed sides.”
I then bent myself down, and made a spring into the air; after which, being quite satisfied that a paring or two more off the edges of the round holes would make all nearly right, I walked on with an air of dignified self-satisfaction that was not to be mistaken. But I had not come within ten yards of the spot where the company was falling in, when I heard the serjeant exclaim,—
“My heyes! look at that ere Ighland savage! I’m damned if he arn’t been cutting big oles in his Majesty’s rigimental breeches!”
A loud horse-laugh burst out from among the men, and the serjeant joined heartily in it. But it was no laughing matter to me; I was cut to the soul. All our horrible anticipations of English officers, halberds, and cat-o’-nine-tails, came smack upon me at once. I was overwhelmed—I grew dizzy—and, before I had well recovered myself, I was marched off to the guard-house under the charge of a corporal and a file of men, and a written crime was given in against me in these terms.