saw the necessary measures taken to check the advancing foe, while the remainder resumed their retreat, lightened of a load of care, which a few minutes before had been almost intolerable.

The conduct of these regiments, as compared with others, was very exemplary during the retreat, although their duty, in protecting the stragglers of the army till the last possible moment, was of the most harassing kind. They had no means of punishing those to whom they were indebted for their extra trouble, but by depriving them of their ill-gotten gains; so that whenever a fellow came in with a bag of flour under his arm, (which was no uncommon occurrence,) they made it à rule to empty the bag over his head, to make him a marked man. Napier says of them, that" for twelve days these hardy soldiers covered the retreat; during which time they had traversed eighty miles of road in two marches, passed several nights under arms in the snow of the mountains, were seven times engaged with the enemy, and now assembled at the outposts (before Corunna,) having fewer men missing from the ranks, including those who had fallen in battle, than any other division in the army."*

I shall now, with the reader's permission, resume the thread of my narrative.

*The foregoing story, I find, has just made its appearance in a volume published by Lieutenant-Colonel Cadell; but as this narrative was publicly noticed, as being in preparation, prior to the publication of his, I have not thought it necessary to expunge it.

CHAPTER III.

An old one takes to his heels, leaving a young one in arms. The dessert does not always follow the last course of-a goose.-Goes to the war, and ends in love.

IN those days, the life of a soldier was a stirring and an active one. I had not joined the regiment above a fortnight when the 1st battalion received orders for immediate active service, and General Graham was to make his appearance on the morrow, to inspect them prior to their embarkation. Every man destined for service was to appear in the ranks, and as my turn had not yet come, I was ordered, the previous evening, to commence my career as a rifleman, in charge of the guard; and a most unhappy debut I made of it, and one that argued but little in behalf of my chances of future fame in the profession.

My guard was composed of a motley assemblage; for, excepting on the back of the sergeant, I remember that there was not a rag of uniform amongst them. I was too anxious to forget all about them to think of informing myself afterwards; but, from what I have since seen, I am satisfied that they must either have been a recent importation from "the first gem of the sea," or they had been furnished for the occasion by the governor of Newgate;-however, be that as it may, I had some ten or a dozen prisoners handed over to me; and as my eye was not sufficiently practised to distinguish, in such a group, which was the soldier and which the prisoner, I very discreetly left the whole affair to the sergeant, who seemed to be a man of nous. But while

I was dozing on the guard-bed, about midnight, I was startled by a scramble in the soldier's room, and the cry of "guard, turn out;" and, on running out to ascertain the cause, the sergeant told me that the light in the guard-house had been purposely upset by some one, and, suspecting that a trick was intended, he had turned out the guard; and truly his suspicions were well-grounded, although he took an erroneous method of counteracting it; for the sentry over the door, not being a much shrewder fellow than myself in distinguishing characters in the dark, in suffering the guard to turn out, had allowed some of the prisoners to turn out too, and, among the rest, one who had been reserved for an especial example of some sort or other, and whose absence was likely to make a noise in the neighbourhood.

This was certainly information enough to furnish me with food for reflection for the remainder of the night, and, as if to enhance its agreeable nature, the sergeant-major paid me a visit at daylight in the morning, and informed me that such things did sometimes happen;-he enumerated several cases of the kind in different regiments, and left me with the consolatory piece of information that the officer of the guard had on each occasion been allowed to retire without a court martial!!! My readers, I am sure, will rejoice with me that in this, as in other cases, there is no rule without an exception, for otherwise they would never have had the pleasure of reading a book of mine.

How I had the good fortune to be excepted on that occasion I never found out; probably, in the hurry and bustle of preparation it was overlooked,-or, probably, because they hoped better things of me thereafter, but my commanding officer never noticed it, and his kindness in so doing put me more on the alert for the future than if he had written a volume of censure.

Among the other novelties of the aforesaid guardhouse on that memorable night, I got acquainted with a very worthy goose, whose services in the Rifle Brigade

well merit a chapter in its history. If any one imagines that a goose is a goose, he is very much mistaken: and I am happy in having the power of undeceiving him. for I am about to show that my (or rather our regimental) goose was shrewd, active, and intelligent, it was a faithful public servant, a social companion, and an attached friend, (I wish that every biped could say but half so much.) Its death or its manner of departure from this world, is still clouded in mystery; but while my book lives, the goose's memory shall not die.

It had attached itself to the guard-house several years prior to my appearance there, and all its doings had been as steady as a sentry-box: its post was with the sentry over the guard; in fine weather it accompanied him in his walk, and in bad, it stood alongside of him in his box. It marched with the officer of the guard in all his visiting rounds, and it was the first on all occasions to give notice of the approach of any one in authority, keeping a particularly sharp look-out for the captain and field-officer of the day, whether by day or night. The guard might sleep, the sentry might sleep, but the goose was ever wide awake. It never considered itself relieved from duty, except during the breakfast and dinner-hours, when it invariably stepped into the guard-house, and partook of the soldiers' cheer, for they were so devotedly attached to it that it was at all times bountifully supplied, and it was not a little amusing, on those occasions, to see how the fellow cackled whenever the soldiers laughed; as if it understood and enjoyed the joke as much as they did.

I did not see Moore's Almanac for 1812, and, therefore, know not whether he predicted that Michaelmas would be fatal to many of the tribe that year; but I never saw a comrade more universally lamented than the poor goose was when the news of its mysterious disappearance reached us in Spain.

Our comrades at home, as a last proof of their affection, very magnanimously offered a reward of ten

pounds for the recovery of the body, dead or alive; but whether it filled a respectable position in a banquet of that year, or still lives to bother the decayed tooth of some elderly maiden, at Michaelmas next, remains to be solved.

On the 24th of March, 1809, our first battalion received orders to march at midnight for Dover, there to be united with the 43d and 52d regiments, as a light brigade, under Major-General Robert Crawfurd, and to embark next morning to join the army which was then assembling in the Peninsula.

In marching for embarkation in those stirring times, the feeling of the troops partook more of the nature of a ship's crew about to sail on a roving commission, than a land-crab expedition which was likely to prove eternal; for although one did occasionally see some blubber-headed fellow mourning over his severed affections for a day or two, yet a thorough-going one just gave a kiss to his wife, if he had one, and two to his sweetheart, if he had not, and away he went with a song in his mouth.

I now joined the 2d battalion, where we were not permitted to rest long on our oars, for, within a month, we were called upon to join the expedition with which

"The Great Earl of Chatham, and a hundred thousand men, Sailed over to Holland, and then sailed back again."

As the military operations of that expedition do not entitle them to a place in such an important history as mine is, I shall pass them over, simply remarking that some of our companies fired a few professional shots, and some of our people got professionally shot, while a great many more visited Death by the doctor's road, and almost all who visited him not, got uncommonly well shaken.

South Beeveland ultimately became our head-quarters. It is a fine island, and very fertile, yielding about forty bushels of frogs an acre, and tadpoles