. In comes a red-headed, stockingless lass, with her
carrots in papers, and lays the cloth for dinner--salt beef and greens.
But the Major's stomach scunners at the Skye-stot--his eyes roll eagerly
for the hot-water--and in a couple of hours he is dead-drunk in his
chair, or stoitering and staggering, in aimless dalliance with the
scullion, among the pots and pans of an ever-disorderly and dirty
kitchen. Mean people, in shabby sporting velveteen dresses, rise up, as
he enters, from the dresser, covered with cans, jugs, and quaichs, and
take off their rusty and greasy napless hats to the Major; and, to
conclude the day worthily and consistently, he squelches himself down
among the reprobate crew, takes his turn at smutty jest and smuttier
song, which drive even the jades out of the kitchen--falls back
insensible, exposed to gross and indecent practical jokes from the
vilest of the unhanged--and finally is carried to bed on a hand-barrow,
with hanging head and heels, like a calf across a butcher's cart, and,
with glazed eyes and lolling tongue, is tumbled upon the quilt--if ever
to awake it is extremely doubtful; but if awake he do, it is to the same
wretched round of brutal degradation--a career, of which the inevitable
close is an unfriended deathbed and a pauper's grave. O hero! six feet
high, and once with a brawn like Hercules--in the prime of life
too--well born and well bred--once bearing the king's commission--and on
that glorious morn, now forgotten or bitterly remembered, thanked on the
field of battle by Picton, though he of the fighting division was a hero
of few words--is that a death worthy of a man--a soldier--and a
Christian? A dram-drinker! Faugh! faugh! Look over--lean over that
stile, where a pig lies wallowing in mire--and a voice, faint and
feeble, and far off, as if it came from some dim and remote world within
your lost soul, will cry, that of the two beasts, that bristly one,
agrunt in sensual sleep, with its snout snoring across the husk-trough,
is, as a physical, moral, and intellectual being, superior to you, late
Major in his Majesty's ---- regiment of foot, now dram-drinker,
drunkard, and dotard, and self-doomed to a disgraceful and disgusting
death ere you shall have completed your thirtieth year. What a changed
being from that day when you carried the colours, and were found, the
bravest of the brave, and the most beautiful of the beautiful, with the
glorious tatters wrapped round your body al