soon granted. The division halted. Both parties started amidst the shouts of the leading files. The wife followed for a few minutes in a canter, while I pursued on foot, to catch a glimpse of the race. She shortly, however, took compassion on me, and pulled up just to allow me to bear her company. In about a quarter of an hour the racers passed on their return. Old Robin's mare was blown. She had no chance against the wiery cross-made garron on which the quarter-master had stuck himself, and to whose lank sides he clung with all his length of leg, (no great length by-the-by,) in order to preserve him from a tumble. His great difficulty now was to stop her: this important task accomplished, he took his post at the head of the detachment in triumph. The wager was a dinner and the et ceteras at the ensuing night's quarters, the loss of which honest Ned cheerfully acknowledged. But it was eight in the evening before we could enjoy the treat; and when it did come, we were intruded on by the presence of the same 'Captain O'Regan" who once before crossed my line of march, and with whom I could find no other fault than that he was an uncommissioned crimp; in other respects a jovial, unpretending, good-humoured fellow. As my name was his passport into the company, I took especial care, by certain occasional allusions, to show how, when, and under what circumstances, my friend the " Captain" became entitled to claim acquaintance with me. 66 My brother ensign, Ned, (one of the best of creatures,) made his new guest welcome, who, though rather vulgar, was not offensively so. He gave us the important intelligence that General Crosbie had passed the two preceding nights at Castle Forbes, and was to leave on that very day for Galway, to inspect General Trench's regiment; and, on the second day following, our own, at Longueville, which town we expected to reach on the following afternoon. So that his information recommended him to the party, who were previously disposed to receive his unlooked-for visit with coldness. The last stage of the march was the most critical one. The report of my strength to a man had been at head-quarters some days; and the loss of one would have been a reflection on my diligence. This night was therefore one of intense watching, not only with the zealous sergeant Macnab, but myself. He had well plied the thirsty recruits; and, with the assistance of old O'Connor, watched the progress from mere inebriety to almost total insensibility in the whole party; and when they were sunk in sleep, he once more went his rounds. With the utmost dismay in his visage, he came to me at midnight to announce his suspicions of the tinker's intended flight. His wife, whom "better than himself he loved," had disappeared; and he himself lay in a fox's sleep in a corner of the barn. To say I was unmoved would be affectation. I was moved even to madness. 66 Have I then been deceived?" I exclaimed. "Had the slave as many lives as hairs, my great revenge has stomach for them all. Seize and handcuff him instantly," was my first order, given in all the insolence of power! Happily for my peace and honour a “second and better thought" prevailed. "Let me see him," said I, in a subdued tone.-To say was to be obeyed. I entered the steaming atmosphere of the inodorous barn, and in one corner, wrapped in deep, profound, and snoring sleep-not the feigned or fox's slumber of the watchful criminal-lay the poor tinker, unconscious of the hostile inquest then holding over his entranced body. The sergeant was still sceptical, but he was a prejudiced evidence. Corporal Dumphy said he was duberous; and of the party, none fell into my favourable way of thinking but old Connor, who volunteered to sleep beside him, with his arm bound and joined to the tinker's, an operation very readily performed in the then insensible state of the sleeper. Morning broke and not a MAN was missing; but there was one woman missing, whose absence, though why I could not tell, my heart could ill support. Rafferty's wife had disappeared at night-fall the preceding evening; and, as it would appear, with his concurrence. Not one of the party seemed in higher spirits, or more eager for the march than the tinker. While others seemed to feel that day as the commencement of their slavery, he bounded along apparently enjoying it as the advent of his freedom. Attaching myself closely to my own party the entire of the day's march, I had frequent opportunities of observing Rafferty's deportment. An unusual flow of spirits appeared to animate him, though always reserved and silent, unless when addressed by me: he more than once accosted me in the course of the morning, and on one occasion advanced to my horse's side, to tell me that " I might depend on him though all the rest should leave me." To my question as to his wife's absence, he replied, "that the barracks were no place to bring his poor dear Ruth to." Four o'clock brought us to the head quarters, and my arrival was welcomed by my old friend, the adjutant, with every demonstration of kindness. Nothing could be more flattering than the reception of my party. The whole corps of officers, then assembled for dinner in the mess-room, congregated to look at my well-dressed and well-ordered party, as it formed on the left of the Dublin squad. My former recruits, now pretty well advanced in the drill, were allowed to mix with my men, and I could count the better portion of a company of my own recruits, the labours of a young inexperienced officer of not three months' standing in the service. The general inspection was appointed for the morrow, Saturday; and the march for Dublin, the point of embarkation, on the following Monday. The morning came, and nearly nine hundred poor devils were paraded for the inspection of the general; of which number, seven hundred and fifty good men and true were to be chosen to constitute His Majesty's Loyal Leinster regiment of foot. The men rejected by the general, who was certainly an indulgent inspector, formed in the rear, out of which number fifty or sixty were selected as fit for invalid companies; but in which condemned squad, I had not the mortification of finding one of my recruits! The regiment was at length passed; its muster-roll signed and certified by the general; and the remainder of the day was passed with great conviviality in the mess-room, where the colonel-commandant had, at his own expense, furnished an elegant repast. He was not one of those who chuckled over the five thousand pounds cleared by the speculation of raising a levy which they never intended to lead to battle: but which they parted with as a farmer would with a flock of sheep to the butcher, and with much the same feelings of compunction. He was a soldier-not a slave-jobber! Not less than forty thousand men were raised in Ireland in 1794, on the sordid principle alluded to. Every day of the autumn of that year, and the spring of 1795, brought a cargo of these white slaves into Liverpool or Bristol; but, to the honour of the Duke of York, the scandalous traffic received a timely check, by his vigorous administration of the office of commander in chief. Many hundreds of unfortunate trepanned captives were sent back to their starving families. The troops which were retained, nobly sustained the honour of the British arms through all the vicissitudes and misfortunes of the first seven years of the war; and the officers of that year form the principal pillars of the temple of our present military fame. 16* . CHAPTER XLIV. "O, what was love made for, if 'tis not the same I but know that I love thee, whatever thou art." THE following day, although Sunday, was one of bustle and business from daylight until dark. The paymaster announced to me the pleasing intelligence, that, on the winding up of my general recruiting account, a balance of one hundred and ninety pounds appeared in my favour; that is to say, my drafts and the advances made to me amounted to little more than five hundred pounds, while my claim for bounties and contingent expenses amounted to upwards of seven hundred pounds; and this same balance in my favour was the entire sum which my kind and still gratefully remembered friend, the poetical army agent, retained as the price of my ensigncy. The two young men who assaulted Rafferty's wife, and whom I had sent off to the head quarters of the ***** militia, to be transferred to Longueville, had been released for the general inspection; and, at the tinker's solicitation, I withdrew the charge against them. The barracks were enclosed by a lofty wall, and sentinels were placed outside as well as within, to guard against desertion. None of the soldiers were permitted to pass the gates, excepting those under the immediate charge of a non-commissioned officer: and I felt somewhat surprised that, amongst the many requests made to me for this indulgence by our recruits, the tinker was silent. Sergeant Macnab, who had not been an attested soldier for the regiment, and who had rendered good service, was a kind of privileged man; and being well known to the adjutant, he availed himself of his interest in that quarter to claim the freedom of the street for such men as from time to time he selected to accompany him. At one of his sallies he asked Rafferty if he wished to go into town for half an hour: the tinker declined; but after the sergeant's depar ture, he approached closely to my side, and asked, in an under tone of voice, "Am I passed, sir? "Yes," I answered. "Are you safe, sir, let what will happen to poor Thigue?" The question staggered me; yet I answered "Yes." In my turn, I demanded his reasons for such an inquiry. "I meant to ask, sir, if you were safe, in case any thing happened to me?” I hardly thought more of this conversation, until summoned from the tea-table of the quarter-master, where, by especial invitation, I had been passing the evening, to attend at the orderly room, where the major, the adjutant, and the surgeon, waited for my arrival, to clear up the mystery of my having passed off a cripple as an able-bodied man, amongst my last batch of recruits. Unfortunate Rafferty was marched limping into the room as a prisoner, with his left leg even more shrunk to appearance than I had before seen it. I appealed to the surgeon's certificate attached to his attestation of his perfect capability for the service; to the re-examination he underwent at the head-quarters the day previous to the inspection, by the surgeon then present; to his able performance on parade, in marching in slow and quick time, perfectly to the satisfaction of the inspecting general; and to the adjutant, for his testimony of the prisoner's activity of limb, during several hours' drill that very day; expressing my own conviction that the appearance of contraction in the leg was a mere trick. The major took occasion, as being the oldest soldier, to detain the inquest, by describing some of the tricks of old hands which he had witnessed at Gibraltar. At the mention of this place, the tinker's face assumed a ghastly hue, and he appeared ready to sink on the spot: he was set down by the shrewd major as a malingarer, a sham cripple, in which opinion the surgeon joined, although, after many bungling attempts, he failed to elucidate his theory of voluntary contraction and expansion of the muscles and sinews. As for the adjutant, (who would, like Sir Thomas More, have cracked a joke on the scaffold,) he contented himself with observing to the culprit, that it was the height of criminality and folly in him to enlist for a soldier; "for you know, my good fellow, if you received the word march, you would halt, and render yourself liable to be shot for disobedience of orders." At length, after some little deliberation, in which the culprit was spared the trouble of defence, by none being required of him, it was unanimously resolved to send him to the guard-house, preparatory to holding a court-martial on him the next morning, when he might be flogged, secundum artem, and discharged with the usual formality. But half an hour had not elapsed before the sergeant of the guard reported that the tinker had evinced such impatience under his moderate restraint, that it required the whole guard to overpower him, so that it became necessary to handcuff him and put him in the black-hole, a precaution highly ap |