class="c1">

The month I have said was April—the April of 1838: old James Hardy and John Coyne were walking beneath the colonnade that faces the water-garden.  They were both old, yet John considered James a mere boy.  John’s face had been “broken up” by a gun-shot wound at Seringapatam, which anticipated time; and James “stumped” very vigorously along on a brace of wooden legs, his eyes bright and twinkling, his laugh ringing out, at the conclusion of each of his brief, pithy stories, which he told as earnestly as if John could hear them; John, however, had heard them all before he became deaf, and as James only re-drew upon his ancient store, John had no great loss.  He looked up in his comrade’s face, caught the cheerful infection of his comrade’s laugh, by sight though not by sound, and laughed also—not as James laughed, but in a little quiet way, something like the rattle of a baby’s drum—and then James would wind it up by saying—“There! did you ever hear the like of that before!” and bestow a sounding slap on his friend’s shoulder.  They were comrades in every sense of the word, for they inhabited the same dormitory, nest by nest; John cherishing a canary, whose song he had never heard, though he used to declare it sang like a nightingale, with a woodlark’s note—while James had ranged all manner of curious crockery on the shelf over his bed, filling up the intermediate spaces with caricatures of the French, the iron head of a halbert, the buckle of a French cuirass, a fragment of an ensign’s gorget, and a few other reliques of a “foughten field,”—

“The treasures of a soldier, bought with blood,
And kept at life’s expense.”

As they strutted lovingly together, delighting, as children do, in sunshine, while James talked and laughed incessantly, a tall, thin, military-looking man, as hard and erect as a ramrod, marched up to them, with as measured a tread as if he were in the ranks; then, wheeling about, presented James with a leaf of laurel, one of many he held in his hand; there was a wild sparkle in his eyes, and a bright flush upon his cheek.

“What for, serjeant-major?” inquired James, taking the leaf, and giving a military salute.

“Toulouse!” answered the veteran, in a voice of triumph; yet the tone was full of music, and rendered ample justice to the musical word.  “Toulouse! my old fellow,” he repeated.

“So it is!” answered James Hardy; “it is the anniversary, sure enough.  And yet, master, if we are to mount a fresh laurel for every day we gained a victory, we shall have to get as many as there are days in the year.”

“Right, Hardy, right,” replied the sergeant-major.  “Right; three hundred and sixty-five laurel-leaves per annum.  Right, that was well said.  Lucy walked out this morning and gathered me a basketful; she knew I’d want them for my old comrades, as soon as I could get down to the college.  She’s worthy to be a soldier’s daughter.”

“Ah, ah! and a soldier’s wife,” responded James; “isn’t she, John?”  And John, thinking James had been telling a story, laughed his little laugh as usual.

“Worthy to be anything, thank God,” said the sergeant-major; but the expression of his face changed; it lost its flush and its proud glance of triumph; anxiety for his only child obliterated even the memory of “Toulouse:”—the soldier was absorbed in the father,—and he continued, “No: I should not like her to be a soldier’s wife, Jem, I should not; she hasn’t strength for campaigning.  It killed her poor mother; they said it was consumption; but it was no such thing.  It was the wet and dry, heat and cold, ups and downs of campaigning; she would not leave me—not she: it is a wonderful thing, the abiding love that links a frail, delicate woman to the rough soldier and his life of hardships; and such a loving mother as she had, and such a home; she never heard anything louder than the ripple of the mountain rill, and the coo of the ringdove, until, a girl of seventeen, she plunged with me into the hot war.  You remember her, Jem?”  The sergeant-major’s seventeen years of widowhood had not dried up the sources of his grief; he drew his hand across his eyes, and then began, hastily and with a tremulous hand, to fit the laurel leaves, which he still held, one within the other.

“That I do—remember her—and well;” answered James Hardy.

“What is it?” inquired old John.  James made him understand they were speaking of poor Mrs. Joyce.

“Ah!” said John, “she was an angel,—Miss Lucy is very like her mother—very like her—even to the way she has in church of laying her hand on her heart—so,—as if it beat too fast.”

“She does not do that, does she, James?” inquired the sergeant-major, eagerly; “I never saw her do that.”

“Likely not,” replied James; “John sees a deal more than those who hear; he is obliged to amuse himself with something; and, as he cannot hear, he sees.”

The sergeant-major paused, and his companions with him; he became abstracted—the leaves dropped from his fingers—and, at last, turning abruptly away, he retraced his steps homewards.

Old John touched his brow with his forefinger significantly, and James muttered to himself—“The wound in his head may have damaged the sergeant-major, to be sure,—but, it is his daughter, poor thing, for all the roses on her cheek, and her sweet voice—!”  John did not hear a word his comrade spoke, but his thoughts were in the same channel.  “He loves to see us all the same,” he said, “as when he was with the old ‘half-hundred,’ and takes a march through the college every morning, keeping wonderful count of our victories; and then mounts guard over his daughter, as regularly as beat of drum;—he’s constant with her; if the sun’s too hot, under the shade of the avenue trees; or, if it is too cold, in the warmth of Cheyne-walk, or with old Mr. Anderson in the botanic garden, gathering the virtues of the herbs, and telling each other tales of the cedars and plane trees of foreign parts; may be, looking through the old water gate, or at the statue of Sir Hans Sloane. [6]  I hear tell that Miss Lucy has great knowledge of such things; but she’ll not live—not she—no more than her mother; I’m sure of that.”

“Who knows?” said James Hardy, “if she had a milder climate, or proper care.”

“Ah! the poor sergeant-major!  He’s always leading some forlorn hope!”

The sergeant-major was one of EIGHTY-THREE THOUSAND MEN who are pensioned by a grateful country; an honourable boon—honourable alike to “those who give, and those who take.”  A wound in the head had rendered him, at an early period of life, unfit for future service, and he had taken up his quarters in his native village, only to watch by the dying bed of a beloved wife, who, after a few years of gradual decline, left him the fatal legacy of a child as delicate as herself.

Of all the evils that wait