earned their name? Listen. I quote the very words of their commander, Captain Bond, who survived to write a History of Looe—and a sound book it is. "The East and West Looe Volunteer Artillery was established in 1803, and kept in pay from Government for six years. Not a single man of the company died during the six years, which is certainly very remarkable."

But, when you come to think of it, what an even more remarkable boast for a body of warriors!

We of Troy (180 men and two uniforms) laughed at this claim. Say what you will, there is no dash about longevity, or very little. For uniform we wore dark-blue coats and pantaloons, with white wings and facings, edged and tasselled with gilt, and scarlet waistcoats, also braided with gilt. We wanted no new name, we! Ours was an inherited one, derived from days when, under Warwick the King-maker, Lord High Admiral of England, we had swept the Channel, summoned the men of Rye and Winchelsea to vail their bonnets—to take in sail, mark you: no trumpery dipping of a flag would satisfy us—and when they stiff-neckedly refused, had silenced the one town and carried off the other's chain to hang across our harbour from blockhouse to blockhouse. Also, was it not a gallant of Troy that assailed and carried the great French pirate, Jean Doree, and clapped him under his own hatches?

"The roaring cannons then were plied,
And dub-a-dub went the drum-a;
The braying trumpets loud they cried
To courage both all and some-a."

"The grappling-hooks were brought at length,
The brown bill and the sword-a;
John Dory at length, for all his strength,
Was clapt fast under board-a."

That was why we wore our uniforms embroidered with gold (dores). The Frenchmen, if they came, would understand the taunt.

But most of all we were proud of Solomon Hymen, our Major and our Mayor of Troy.

I can see him now as he addressed us on the evening of our first drill, standing beside the two long nineteen-pounders on the Old Fort; erect, with a hand upon his ivory sword-hilt, his knops and epaulettes flashing against the level sun. I can see his very gesture as he enjoined silence on the band; for we had a band, and it was playing "Come, Cheer Up, My Lads!" As though we weren't cheerful enough already!

[But "Come, come!" the reader will object. "All this happened a hundred years ago. Yet here are you talking as if you had been present." Very true: it is a way we have in Troy. Call it a foible—but forgive it! The other day, for instance, happening on the Town Quay, I found our gasman, Mr. Rabling, an earnest Methodist, discussing to a small crowd on the subject of the Golden Calf, and in this fashion: "Well, friends, in the midst of all this pillaloo, hands-across and down-the-middle, with old Aaron as bad as any and flinging his legs about more boldacious with every caper, I happens to glance up the hill, and with that I gives a whistle; for what do I see but a man aloft there picking his way down on his heels with a parcel under his arm! Every now and then he pulls up, shading his eyes, so, like as if he'd a lost his bearin's. I glances across to Aaron, and thinks I, 'Look out for squalls! Here's big brother coming, and a nice credit this'll be to the family!'…" The historic present, as my Latin grammar used to call it, is our favourite tense: and if you insist that, not being a hundred years old, I cannot speak as an eye-witness of this historic scene, my answer must be Browning's,—

"All I can say is—I saw it!"]

"Gentlemen!" began the Major.

We might not all be officers, like the Mevagissey Artillery, but in the Troy Gallants we were all gentlemen.

"Gentlemen!"—the Major waved an arm seaward—"yonder lies your enemy. Behind you"—he pointed up the harbour to the town— "England relies on your protection. Shall the Corsican tyrant lay his lascivious hands upon her ancient liberties, her reformed and Protestant religion, her respectable Sovereign and his Consort, her mansions, her humble cottages, and those members of the opposite sex whose charms reward, and, in rewarding, refine us? Or shall we meet his flat-bottomed boats with a united front, a stern 'Thus far and no farther,' and send them home with their tails between their legs? That, gentlemen, is the alternative. Which will you choose?"

Here the Major paused, and finding that he expected an answer, we turned our eyes with one consent upon Gunner Sobey, the readiest man in the company.

"The latter!" said Gunner Sobey, with precision; whereat we gave three cheers. We dined, that afternoon, in the Long Room of the "Ship" Inn, and afterwards danced the night through in the Town Hall.

The Major danced famously. Above all things, he prided himself on being a ladies' man, and the fair sex (as he always called them) admired him without disguise. His manner towards them was gallant yet deferential, tender yet manly. He conceded everything to their weakness; yet no man in Troy could treat a woman with greater plainness of speech. The confirmed spinsters (high and low, rich and poor, we counted seventy-three of them in Troy) seemed to like him none the less because he lost no occasion, public or private, of commending wedlock. For the doctrine of Mr. Malthus (recently promoted to a Professorship at the East India College) he had a robust contempt. He openly regretted that, owing to the negligence of our forefathers, the outbreak of war found Great Britain with but fifteen million inhabitants to match against twenty-five million Frenchmen. They threatened to invade us, whereas we should rather have been in a position to march on Paris! He asked nothing better. He quoted with sardonic emphasis the remark of a politician that "'twas hardly worth while to go to war merely to prove that we could put ourselves in a good posture for defence."

"If I had my way," announced Major Hymen, "every woman in England should have a dozen children at least."

"What a man!" said Miss Pescod afterwards to Miss Sally Tregentil, who had dropped in for a cup of tea.

And yet the Major was a bachelor. They could not help wondering a little.

"With two such names, too!" mused Miss Sally. "'Solomon' and 'Hymen'; they certainly suggest—they would almost seem to give promise of, at least, a dual destiny."

"You mark my words," said Miss Pescod. "That man has been crossed in love."

"But who?" asked Miss Sally, her eyes widening in speculation. "Who could have done such a thing?"

"My dear, I understand there are women in London capable of anything."

The Major, you must know, had spent the greater part of his life in the capital as a silk-mercer and linen-draper—I believe, in the Old Jewry; at any rate, not far from Cheapside. He had left us at the age of sixteen to repair the fortunes of his family, once opulent and respected, but brought low by his great-grandfather's rash operations in South Sea stock. In London, thanks to an ingratiating manner with the sex on which a linen-draper relies for patronage, he had prospered, had amassed a competence, and had sold his business to retire to his native town, as Shakespeare retired to Stratford-on-Avon, and at about the same period of life.

Had the Major in London been crossed in love? No; I incline to believe that Miss Pescod was mistaken. That hearts, up there, fluttered for a man of his presence is probable, nay certain. In port and even in features he bore a singular likeness to the Prince Regent. He himself could not but be aware of this, having heard it so often remarked upon by persons acquainted with his Royal Highness as well as by others who had never set eyes on him. In short,