“Captain,” said I, now quite brought to bay, and making up my mind to go through with it, whatever the consequences might be; “Captain, if your honor will but hear me, I will speak.”
“Speak on then,” said Captain Ketley, “provided you say nothing that as an officer I may not listen to. Serjeant Nevett, you may retire.”
“You need not fear that I shall offend you, Captain Ketley,” said I, “I have been over long accustomed to speak to officers to forget the respect and duty I owe to them as a sodger, and since your honour is so kind, I will be as short as I can. I enlisted, you see, to serve in the Inverness Highlanders, and in so doing I covenanted to fight in company with my own countrymen, and in the freedom of a kilt. Now, against all bargain—against all manner of justice—against my will—and against the very nature of a Hillantman, I have been thrust, first into this English regiment, and then into this pair of English small clothes—well may they be so called, I’m sure. Captain Ketley, all this is most unreasonable. You might as well put a deer of the mountains into a breachame, and expect to plough the land with him, as to put a Hillantman into such cruel harness as thir things, with the hope that he can do his work in them; and, although I am as wishful as any man that serves King George can be, to spend the last drop of my blood, as some of it has flowed already in the cause of his Majesty, God bless him! and for our common country, yet I will just tell your honour plainly and honestly—though with all manner of respect—that I will not stay in this Ninth Regiment to be kept in the eternal torture of thir breeks, though I should see the men drawn out to shoot me for trying to desert—for death itself is desirable rather than that I should longer endure such misery as this. So I say again, that although I am quite willing to serve King George in any regiment he may be pleased to put me into that wears the kilt, yet I will take the first moment I can catch, to run away from such disgraceful and heartbreaking bondage as this to which I am now subjected.”
“No, no, my good fellow,” said Captain Ketley, who had all this time had his own share of trouble in keeping himself from laughing, and who now gave way and laughed outright; “you must not run away from us, Archy. We cannot afford to lose so good a man. We must do all we can to put you at your ease with us. Your complaints are certainly not altogether unreasonable. But you should not have cut holes in your breeches—you should have come and stated your grievances to me. Remember in future, that you will always find me ready to listen to any well-founded complaint you may have to make. Meanwhile,—see here,” said he, taking a pair of old loose trowsers out of his chest, and tossing them to me,—“wear these for a few days, till your limbs get somewhat accustomed to the thraldom of small clothes, and until we can get you fitted with a better and easier pair of your own. I shall see about your immediate release from confinement, and that you and your Highland comrades be excused from duty until you are more at home in your new clothing. If you behave yourself well, you shall always find a friend in me.”
“God bless your honour!” cried I, with a joyful and grateful heart, and, if you will believe me, gentlemen, almost with the tears in my eyes; “your honour has spoken to me just like one of our own kind Hillant officers of the Ninety-seventh. I’ll go all the world over with you, though my breeks were of iron!”
Well, gentlemen, Captain Ketley was as good as his word—he was a kind and steady friend to me as long as he lived. He inquired of me whether I could read and write; and, finding that I could do both—aye, and spell too—and that somewhat better, as I reckon, than Serjeant Nevett,—and, moreover, that I was not a bad hand at counting,—he got me made a corporal in less than a fortnight, and, very soon after that, a serjeant. But, woe’s me! a few months had hardly passed away when Captain Ketley died. Many were the salt tears I shed over his grave, after we had given him our parting vollies, and no wonder, for he was one of the best friends I ever had in my life. I cannot think of him, even yet, without regret. Willingly would I have given my life for his at any time. But what is this miserable world, gentlemen, but a valley of sorrow?
Well, I got fond enough, after all, of the Holy Boys, as the old Ninth lads were called.
Clifford (interrupting.)—How did they get that name, Archy?
Serjeant.—Oh, I’ll tell you that, sir.—You see, when they came from the West Indies, as a skeleton regiment, they were made up again with growing boys. Colonel Campbell of Blythswood tried to do them some good by getting them schoolmasters and Bibles. But the young rogues had been ill nurtured in the parent nest, and they used to barter their Bibles for gin and gingerbread. The Duke of York used to say of them, that they were every thing that was bad but bad sodgers—ha! ha! ha!
And now, gentlemen, I believe I have little more to tell you about myself, except that I got my jaw broken in two places by a musket ball in Holland, on the 19th of September 1799. See what a queer kind of a mouth it has made me in the inside here. You see I had been out superintending the working party in the redoubts, and I had returned, tired as a dog, to the barn where the light company were quartered, and had just laid my head on my wife’s knee to take a nap—for I was married by this time—when a terrible thumping came to the door, and Corporal Parrot ran to see who was there. Now, it happened that one of our serjeants was sick, and the other had been killed.—It was Adjutant Orchard who knocked so loud.