sessed a sweetheart, and the sweetheart lived
in England, and if Brown still loved her--as has already been more
than hinted at--it is not at all unreasonable to wonder why he had no
likeness of her, no news of her, nothing but her memory around which
to weave the woof of sentiment--at least, it's not unreasonable so to
wonder in this late year of grace.

Then, though, in 1857, when a newspaper cost threepence or thereabouts,
and schools were so far from being free that only the sons of gentlemen
(and seldom the daughters of even gentlemen, remember) attended them,
the art of reading was not so common as it now is. Writing was still
more uncommon. And it has not been pretended that Brown was other than a
commoner. He was a stiff-backed man, and honest. And the pride that had
raised him to the rank of sergeant was even stiffer than his stock. But
he came from the ranks that owned no vote, nor little else, in those
days, and he owned a sweetheart of the same rank as himself, who could
neither read nor write. And when people whose somewhat primitive ideas
on right and wrong lead them to look on daguerreotypes as works of the
devil happen too to be living more than five thousand miles apart, when
one of the two can not write, nor readily afford the cost of postage,
and when the other is nearly always on the move from post to post, it is
not exactly to be wondered at that memory of each other was all they had
to dwell upon.

A journey to India in '57 meant, to the rank and file, oblivion and
worse. There were men then, of course, just as there are now, who would
leave a girl behind them tied fast by a promise of futile and endless
devotion; men who knew what the girls did not know--that India was all
but inaccessible to any one outside of government employ, and that a
common soldier's chance of sending for his girl, or of coming home
again to claim her, was something in the neighborhood of one in thirty
thousand.

But there were other men, like William Brown, who were a shade too
honest and too stiff-chinned to buckle under to the social conditions
of England in those days, and who were consequently not exactly pestered
with offers of employment. And a man who could see the difference
between doffing his ragged cap to a dissolute squire or parson, and
saluting his better on parade, could also see the selfishness of leaving
an honest girl to languish for him. Brown could not get a living in
England. So he told his girl to