“P.S. I forgot to mention that Hawthorne’s daughter accompanies him; you had better enclose a note to her.
“J. L’E.”
“Confound it!” I cried, “it’s really too bad of Uncle Jimmy to saddle us with some dried-up statistician and his mummy daughter. You must write to him, madre mia, saying that I am at Derravanagh and beyond reach of post and wire.”
“If your uncle wasn’t very anxious about this he would never write so urgently; and don’t you think a little sacrifice is due to him?”
My mother was in the right. A moment’s reflection told me that my uncle’s letter was as forcible as an act of Parliament.
“Besides,” added my mother, with a cheery smile like a ray of sunshine, “this Mr. Hawthorne may be a sportsman and enjoy the shooting as keenly as Harry Welstone or yourself.”
My uncle was, or I should say is—for while I write he is enjoying a pipe in the company of Barney Corcoran, who stands to him in the same capacity as did Corporal Trim to “My Uncle Toby”—as thorough a gentleman as ever saw the light of day. Simple, unassuming, loyal, generous, brave, he actually refused the recommendation for the Victoria Cross, in order that a fair-haired boy, whose very soul was set upon its possession, might receive the decoration. Pure-minded and good, he is at once, as Bayard, sans peur et sans reproche.
Jimmy entered the army in the year 1847, roving about with his regiment from clime to clime with a superb indifference as to change of scene, but with a fervid determination to remain with the gallant Thirty-third; and it was only when the Crimean war-cloud loomed overhead that he resolved upon quitting the old corps for one under orders for the East. One-half of the fighting Thirty-third volunteered with him, and the great redoubt at the Alma is steeped in the blood of many a gallant fellow who chose to follow the fortunes of Jimmy L’Estrange.
Jimmy was badly hit at Inkerman, and was sent home invalided, to be nursed by my mother. In a few months, however, he returned to the seat of war, only to be knocked over at the taking of the Redan, which he entered side by side with the dashing Tom Esmonde, where, in addition to a bayonet thrust in the chest, he was made the depositary of a bullet in the right leg. This bullet, clumsily extracted by an unskilful surgeon, constitutes the only decoration my uncle deigns to wear, and he carries it suspended from the steel chain attached to a huge gold watch formerly in possession of his great-grandfather, to whom King James presented it ere he rode from the disastrous battle-field of the Boyne.
Jimmy has eight thousand pounds lent out at four per cent., and lives like a nabob at his London club—reading the Army and Navy Gazette all the morning, gossiping with his former companions-in-arms during the afternoon, sunning himself in the park until dinner-time, and playing shilling whist up to his wonted hour for turning in for the night. He spends three months in every year at Kilkenley, during which, by a judicious course of open air, early hours, plain food, and ‘34 claret, he is enabled to undertake the London campaign with renewed vigor and vitality.