of
Alexandria. And then, as he succeeded in procuring his discharge during
the short peace of 1802, he returned home with a small sum of
hardly-earned prize-money, heartily sick of war and bloodshed. I was
asked not long ago by one of his few surviving comrades, whether my
uncle had ever told me that _their_ gun was the first landed in Egypt,
and the first dragged up the sand-bank immediately over the beach, and
how hot it grew under their hands, as, with a rapidity unsurpassed along
the line, they poured out in thick succession its iron discharges upon
the enemy. I had to reply in the negative. All my uncle's narratives
were narratives of what he had seen--not of what he had done; and when,
perusing, late in life, one of his favourite works--Dr. Keith's "Signs
of the Times"--he came to the chapter in which that excellent writer
describes the time of hot naval warfare which immediately followed the
breaking out of war, as the period in which the second vial was poured
out on the sea, and in which the waters "became as the blood of a dead
man, so that every living soul died in the sea," I saw him bend his head
in reverence as he remarked, "Prophecy, I find, gives to all our glories
but a single verse, and it is a verse of judgment." Uncle Sandy,
however, did not urge the peace principles which he had acquired amid
scenes of death and carnage, into any extravagant consequences; and on
the breaking out, in 1803, of the second war of the Revolution, when
Napoleon threatened invasion from Brest and Boulogne, he at once
shouldered his musket as a volunteer. He had not his brother's fluency
of speech; but his narratives of what he had seen were singularly
truthful and graphic; and his descriptions of foreign plants and
animals, and of the aspect of the distant regions which he had visited,
had all the careful minuteness of those of a Dampier. He had a decided
turn for natural history. My collection contains a murex, not unfrequent
in the Mediterranean, which he found time enough to transfer, during the
heat of the landing in Egypt, from the beach to his pocket; and the
first ammonite I ever saw was a specimen, which I still retain, that he
brought home with him from one of the Liassic deposits of England.

Early on the Sabbath evenings I used regularly to attend at my uncle's
with two of my maternal cousins, boys of about my own age, and latterly
with my two sisters, to be catechized, first on the Shorter Catechism,
and then o