and
the youngest cornet in the regiment felt himself the Colonel's inferior
in the gaiety of the mess as much as at the head of the squadrons.

At the end of a few days I received from Paris the papers necessary
to relieve me from the restraint of my parole, and was concerting
with O'Grady the steps necessary to be taken to resume my rank in the
service, when an incident occurred which altered all our plans for the
moment, and, by one of those strange casualties which so often occur in
life, gave a new current to my own fate for ever.

I should mention here, that, amid all the rejoicings which ushered in
the restoration, amid all the flattery by which the allied armies were
received, one portion of the royalists maintained a dogged, ungenial
spirit towards the men by whom their cause was rendered victorious,
and never forgave them the honour of reviving a dynasty to which they
themselves had contributed nothing. These were the old _militaires_ of
Louis xviii.--the men who, too proud or too good-for-nothing to accept
service under the Emperor, had lain dormant during the glorious
career of the French armies, and who now, in their hour of defeat and
adversity, started into life as the representatives of the military
genius of the country. These men, I say, hated the English with a
vindictive animosity which the old Napoleonists could not equal. Without
the generous rivalry of an open foe, they felt themselves humbled by
comparison with the soldiers whose weather-beaten faces and shattered
limbs bore token of a hundred battles, and for the very cause, too, for
which they themselves were the most interested. This ungenerous spirit
found vent for itself in a thousand petty annoyances, which were
practised upon our troops in every town and village of the north of
France; and every officer whose billet consigned him to the house of
a royalist soldier would gladly have exchanged his quarters for the
companionship of the most inveterate follower of Napoleon. To an
instance of what I have mentioned was owing the incident which I am
about to relate.

To relieve the ennui of a French village, the officers of the Eighteenth
had, with wonderful expenditure of skill and labour, succeeded in
getting up a four-in-hand drag, which, to the astonishment and wonder
of the natives, was seen daily wending its course through the devious
alleys and narrow streets of the little town, the roof covered with
dashing dragoons, whose laughing face