1830.] The Malcontent. 525 



By miracle I discovered that she had been tampering with the church- 

 warden, who had permitted her to sophisticate the parish-register ! 

 The fiend had, in cold blood, taken off a few dozen years from her own 

 age, and given the overplus to her grandmother, who was in reality born, 

 I believe, somewhere about the year A.D. 1 ! But from these and 

 similar annoyances were we called away to partake the glories of the 

 war, and rear our laurels in the hotbed of slaughter. 



When I was first introduced into the field a new and undefined feeling 

 took possession of me a feeling which was soon lost in emotions of dis- 

 gustful honour and excuseable concern. Had I been brought here to be 

 butchered ? Good Heavens ! was a valuable life to be thrown away ? 

 Was a probable extensive round of good offices a career of social and re- 

 ciprocal benefits, to be put an end to by a devotion to mere doubtful ad- 

 vantages to problematical triumphs ? Had I been lured into this scene 

 of riotous and disorderly madmen for the express purpose of being no 

 longer suffered to live ? I had not thought of this. " The spirit- 

 stirring drum and ear-piercing fife," were already fearfully agitating 

 the horse under me ; so much so, that I was in momentary expectation 

 of not being able to ascertain whether I was upon my head or my heels ! 

 Our colonel, rash fool ! had adopted a notion, that to charge the enemy 

 was no less than a duty, and straight commenced a vulgar vociferation, 

 exhorting us to follow his example. Misguided wretch ! it never en- 

 tered his head that a bullet was about to do so a most veritable cala- 

 mity, however. The major, too, than whom a more-to-be-regretted 

 officer never lived or died, discarding prudence, was making himself 

 fatally conspicuous in the war. Alas ! those vital properties that were, 

 a moment before, so active aye, I may say, so rampant, within him 

 by a sudden poke in the regions of the stomach from one, it appeared, 

 not in the least well-disposed towards him, were extinguished. I was 

 paralysed ! That men, professing Christianity, whose lives were of the 

 least value to any but the owner, and whose souls were thus vibrating 

 in a perilous contingency, should demean themselves after this fashion, 

 was astounding ! 



When, however, by some vague impulse driven, my too-spirited 

 horse commenced hurrying about the ranks with all the miraculous ex- 

 pedition of a private bill through the House of Commons, and with me 

 appended to it by way of rider then that natural alarm (not fear !) took 

 possession of me, that may be more appropriately denominated discre- 

 tion ; and my faculties, drawn away by an astonishing instinct from all 

 other considerations, or outward phenomena, were concentrated with 

 tenacious sagacity upon my own proper safety, and the most effectual 

 and instant means of securing it ; for the fact is, this involuntary and 

 alarming celerity of movement was actually doing nothing less than 

 making me the unwilling means of appropriating to myself all such 

 loose, or spent, or lively balls, as were taking their otherwise inoffensive 

 course or which might, at all events, be better employed in dismissing* 

 the drummers and other tuneful appendages to the regiment. And: 

 though none of them, by special good fortune, did take effect upon me, 

 yet, I contend, my presence in the field, and in all parts of it at the 

 same instant, was a most lamentable indiscretion ; attributable, I feel, to> 

 the wrong-headed obstinacy of the steed in question. 



In the meantime, a figure, with his head curiously carved and other- 

 wise grossly maltreated, raised a senseless clamour for reinforcements ; 



