witnessed those scenes, but they remain as fresh in his memory as on the
day when first he saw them as a young man. A cloud, as of grief, that
had lowered over him, and had wrapped the last years of his life in
gloom, seemed to clear away from Esmond during this fortunate voyage and
campaign. His energies seemed to awaken and to expand under a cheerful
sense of freedom. Was his heart secretly glad to have escaped from that
fond but ignoble bondage at home? Was it that the inferiority to
which the idea of his base birth had compelled him, vanished with the
knowledge of that secret, which though, perforce, kept to himself, was
yet enough to cheer and console him? At any rate, young Esmond of the
army was quite a different being to the sad little dependant of the
kind Castlewood household, and the melancholy student of Trinity Walks;
discontented with his fate, and with the vocation into which that drove
him, and thinking, with a secret indignation, that the cassock and
bands, and the very sacred office with which he had once proposed to
invest himself, were, in fact, but marks of a servitude which was to
continue all his life long. For, disguise it as he might to himself,
he had all along felt that to be Castlewood's chaplain was to be
Castlewood's inferior still, and that his life was but to be a long,
hopeless servitude. So, indeed, he was far from grudging his old friend
Tom Tusher's good fortune (as Tom, no doubt, thought it). Had it been a
mitre and Lambeth which his friends offered him, and not a small living
and a country parsonage, he would have felt as much a slave in one case
as in the other, and was quite happy and thankful to be free.

The bravest man I ever knew in the army, and who had been present in
most of King William's actions, as well as in the campaigns of the great
Duke of Marlborough, could never be got to tell us of any achievement of
his, except that once Prince Eugene ordered him up a tree to reconnoitre
the enemy, which feat he could not achieve on account of the horseman's
boots he wore; and on another day that he was very nearly taken prisoner
because of these jack-boots, which prevented him from running away.
The present narrator shall imitate this laudable reserve, and doth not
intend to dwell upon his military exploits, which were in truth not very
different from those of a thousand other gentlemen. This first campaign
of Mr. Esmond's lasted but a few days; and as a score of books have been