ountry north-eastward, and had the honor of fighting by the side of
Lord Lake at Laswaree, Deeg, Furruckabad, Futtyghur, and Bhurtpore:
but I will not boast of my actions--the military man knows them, MY
SOVEREIGN appreciates them. If asked who was the bravest man of the
Indian army, there is not an officer belonging to it who would not cry
at once, GAHAGAN. The fact is, I was desperate: I cared not for life,
deprived of Julia Jowler.

With Julia's stony looks ever before my eyes, her father's stern refusal
in my ears, I did not care, at the close of the campaign, again to seek
her company or to press my suit. We were eighteen months on service,
marching and countermarching, and fighting almost every other day: to
the world I did not seem altered; but the world only saw the face, and
not the seared and blighted heart within me. My valor, always
desperate, now reached to a pitch of cruelty; I tortured my grooms and
grass-cutters for the most trifling offence or error,--I never in action
spared a man,--I sheared off three hundred and nine heads in the course
of that single campaign.

Some influence, equally melancholy, seemed to have fallen upon poor old
Jowler. About six months after we had left Dum Dum, he received a
parcel of letters from Benares (whither his wife had retired with her
daughter), and so deeply did they seem to weigh upon his spirits, that
he ordered eleven men of his regiment to be flogged within two days; but
it was against the blacks that he chiefly turned his wrath. Our fellows,
in the heat and hurry of the campaign, were in the habit of dealing
rather roughly with their prisoners, to extract treasure from them: they
used to pull their nails out by the root, to boil them in kedgeree pots,
to flog them and dress their wounds with cayenne pepper, and so on.
Jowler, when he heard of these proceedings, which before had always
justly exasperated him (he was a humane and kind little man), used now
to smile fiercely and say, "D--- the black scoundrels! Serve them right,
serve them right!"

One day, about a couple of miles in advance of the column, I had been
on a foraging-party with a few dragoons, and was returning peaceably
to camp, when of a sudden a troop of Mahrattas burst on us from a
neighboring mango-tope, in which they had been hidden: in an instant
three of my men's saddles were empty, and I was left with but seven more
to make head against at least thirty of these vagabond black horsemen.
I ne