Chapter I: Boyhood

"When is a man the arbiter of his own destiny? for he is like the leaf which is torn from a tree, and which the wind of heaven blows about."

This fate has been my own, as peculiarly as it has been that of other military wanderers in life; for your soldier is a great traveller both by sea and land, an errant and a restless spirit; yet his travels and his restlessness are involuntary; for the moment he dons the red coat he ceases to be the master of "his own proper person," or (like the leaf torn from the tree) to be the arbiter of his own destiny; but must march, sail, or fight wheresoever he may be ordered, _obedience_ being the first word in his vocabulary. He becomes a machine in some sort, yet _not_ a machine according to the degrading idea of his sapient majesty of Prussia; for the history of mankind will prove that the most brilliant achievements in war, and the most happy results in peace, like those efforts by which thrones have been won and nations freed, had their origin in the influence of the human heart, and in the mastery of the human passions, when hope, religion, or love of country, fired the soldier's spirit! Who, then, will dare to say that the poor private soldier who mounts a deadly breach, or rushes on a hedge of steel, risking mutilation, wounds, and death, without the hope of future fame if he falls, or the chance of sharing in the glory of the victory his valour wins if he survive,--is the mere automaton, the cold in blood and basely utilitarian would have him to be?

Love of country, a noble sentiment, is ever strong in the heart of a true soldier. When the 67th, or South Hampshire regiment, commanded by Callender of Craigforth, landed at Portsmouth in 1772, after a long career of dangerous foreign service, with one accord and impulse the whole of the men threw themselves on the beach and kissed the pebbles.

The reader will pardon the professional vanity, or _esprit de corps_, which makes me thus prelude the plain unvarnished story of a soldier's career,--a description of some of the adventures I have passed through, the persons I have met, and the scenes I have witnessed on my march through life.

I was born in the camp of Burgoyne's army when it was on the borders of Lake Champlain: thus, the first sounds to which my infant ears became accustomed were the rattle of the drum, the notes of the Kentish bugle, the tread of marching feet, and the thoughtless hilarity of my father's comrades.

I remember myself first as a little boy, the pet and plaything of the soldiers, who made bats and balls, tops and toys for me; who allowed me to ride on their backs, and to hold on by their queues, whenever I had a mind to do so; who told me old stories of Wolfe's days, of the siege of Belleisle, and of wild adventures in West Florida. I remember of marches from town to town, from camp to barrack, and from fort to fort--all of which seem like dreams to me now; while the troops trod on, through clouds of summer dust or the deep snows of an American winter, and I with other regimental imps, sat merrily and cosily perched on the summit of a baggage-waggon, among trunks, arm-chests, knapsacks, pots, kettles, and soldiers' wives, who smoked, sung, and swore occasionally, and bantered the escort who marched on each side, with bayonets fixed. A thousand childish incidents of the soldiers' kindness to me when a boy (because they loved my father well), are lingering in my memory, while many a more important event of the days and years between that time and this, is forgotten for ever.

My father was a captain in a Scottish regiment, which formed a portion of Sir John Burgoyne's unfortunate army. He had received a severe wound at the storming of a stockaded fort near Skenesborough, and had to undergo the delicate operation of trepanning, which was skilfully done with a silver plate, whereon he had fancifully inscribed his name and the number of the regiment. He was afterwards slain in a skirmish on the banks of the Hudson, and was hastily buried on the field. The _last_ time I saw him, was when my mother, with her eyes full of tears, held me up in her arms that the poor man might kiss me, as he was buckling on his sword, while the troops went hurriedly to the front. The livelong day the roar of the distant musketry rung in the pale woman's ears and in her soul, as the din of battle rose and fell upon the gusty wind. At sunset the troops came back defeated and dispirited; but my father _not_ among them. He was lying at the foot of a pine-tree, shot through the heart!

After this bereavement, my mother returned home with her two children (my sister Lotty and myself), and, renting a small cottage, about a mile from her native town, lived the quiet and secluded life that the scanty pension of a captain's widow allotted her.

I was two years older than dear little Lotty, who was a pretty black-eyed girl, with a fair skin, and great masses of dark-brown hair.

At our mother's side, as children, we prattled and talked of the regiment. It was the centre around which our thoughts revolved; the feature upon which all our conversations and infant recollections hinged, though its ranks were filling fast with new faces, and the old had long since forgotten us; yet it was always "the Regiment"--our once happy, movable home--that we spoke of, as of some good friend that loved us, and was far away; and I loved the coarse red uniform, with its pewter buttons and white braid, for its wearers seemed a race of men apart from the cold and selfish society among which my mother's diminished means and widowhood had cast her. She, poor woman! seemed to feel something of this, too; for more than once, on beholding a wayfaring soldier passing through our quiet little village, I have seen her start, with her eyes full of tears, as her thoughts reverted to _him_ who was sleeping far away in his lonely grave by the shore of the mighty Hudson. Like that old Scottish lady who is so beautifully portrayed in the "Lounger," "when she spoke of a soldier, it was in a style above her usual simplicity; there was a sort of swell in her language which sometimes a tear (for her age had not lost the privilege of tears) made still more eloquent. She kept her sorrows, like the devotions that solaced them, sacred to herself; they threw nothing of gloom over her deportment; a gentle shade only, like the fleckered clouds of summer, that increase, not diminish, the benignity of the season."

The pretty village in which we resided lay at the bottom of a dell, which, in shape, resembled a great natural basin. Its sloping sides were clothed with luxuriant wood. Above the ancient trees, the old grey belfry of the village church--a church in which Knox had preached and the Covenant was signed--peeped forth from a mass of ivy that clambered to its weathercock. Through the dell brawled a rapid stream, which came foaming down from the mountains, and turned the great mossy wheel of an ancient mill, which, with the blue-slated manse, the quaint old kirk, and the ruined fragment of a haunted tower, wherein, as legends averred, a spectre wandered and treasure was buried, formed the four principal features in the valley.

The stream where the spotted trout lurked in the deeper holes, or shot to and fro in the sunbeams, was crossed by a little bridge, which, in my boyhood, I considered a great work of art, though, in after-years, I was astonished to find it so diminutive. The rush of the mill-race, as it poured in white foam over a wooden duct; the voices of the children that played on the green before the village school; the ceaseless clink of the hammer in the forge, which formed the rendezvous of all the male gossips; the occasional note of a blackbird or a cushat dove from the coppice,--were the only sounds that were heard in our valley, save when the tolling of the church bell announced the Sunday, when the air was hushed and still, "and even the forest leaves seemed stirred with prayer."

Though little more than a mile from a large and populous city, our hamlet was as secluded as if it had been twenty leagues distant. No thought had we then of railroads, electric wires, or Atlantic cables; and even the stage-coach passed far from our wooded locality.

Our cottage was neat and small: it was situated on a slope of the dell which faced the south, and was buried among the woodbine, clematis, and sweetbrier, which covered all its rustic porch, grew around the windows, and clambered over the chimney-tops.

I can yet, in memory, see the little parlour in which we used to sit in the long nights of winter, by the cheerful fire, above which hung my father's sword and old gilt gorget, with two engravings of General Wolfe and the Marquis of Cornwallis in full uniform, with white breeches and kevenhuller hats; and where we spent the calm evenings of summer, when the light lingered long in the blushing west, and the perfume of the sweetbrier, the wild roses, the ripening fields, and of the fragrant earth, on which the dew was descending, were borne through the open windows; while my mother--her grey hair smoothly banded under a spotless white cap, her black dress and meek sweet face making her look so like a picture, her work-basket and knitting apparatus at hand--read to Lotty and me, or spoke of scenes and adventures she had seen when far away from our present quiet locality, as she had an excellent memory for anecdotes and a refined literary taste. Thus she became our sole preceptress.

Save old Dr. Twaddel, the minister, and the village doctor, we had no neighbours, and consequently few visitors.

My mother spoke seldom of our father; but we could see by the current of her thoughts that they rarely ran on aught else than his memory. Hopes she had none, save those that were centred on us.

So, for seven years, the blameless tenor of our even life rolled on.

My mother's quiet gentleness and soft ladylike manner, together with her kindness to the poor of the village, the sick and dying, among whom she shared her widow's mite--the mite that in heaven shall become a talent of price,--caused her to be tenderly loved by all; and I repent me now, even after the long lapse of many stirring years, that in her latter days, the tears that rolled over her pale and fast-furrowing cheeks were caused by my errors, and it may be, my selfish and resentful pride.