of himself, despaired of by others, he has
"gone wrong and run wild." His heart, still in the right place, has been
sealed up. "Betrothed to a good and beautiful girl whom he had loved
better than she--or perhaps even he--believed," he had given her cause,
in an evil hour, to tell him solemnly that she would never marry any
other man; that she would live single for his sake, but that her lips,
"that Mary Marshall's lips," would never address another word to him
on earth, bidding him in the end--Go! and Heaven forgive him! Hence,
in point of fact, this journey of his on foot down to Chatham, for the
purpose of enlisting, if possible, in a cavalry regiment, his object
being to get shot, though he himself thinks in his devil-may-care
indifference, that "he might as well ride to death as be at the trouble
of walking." Premising simply that his hero's age is at this time
twenty-two, and his height five foot ten, and that, there being no
cavalry at the moment in Chatham, he enlists into a regiment of the
line, where he is glad to get drunk and forget all about it, the Author
readily made the path clear for the opening up of his narrative.

Whenever Charles Dickens introduced this tale among his Readings, how
beautifully he related it! After recounting how Private Doubledick was
clearly going to the dogs, associating himself with the dregs of every
regiment, seldom being sober and constantly under punishment, until
it became plain at last to the whole barracks that very soon indeed
he would come to be flogged, when the Reader came at this point to the
words--"Now the captain of Doubledick's company was a young gentleman
not above five years his senior, whose eyes had an expression in them
which affected Private Doubledick in a very remarkable way"--the effect
was singularly striking. Out of the Reader's own eyes would look the
eyes of that Captain, as the Author himself describes them: "They were
bright, handsome, dark eyes, what are called laughing eyes generally,
and, when serious, rather steady than severe." But, he immediately went
on to say, they were the only eyes then left in his narrowed world
that could not be met without a sense of shame by Private Doubledick.
Insomuch that if he observed Captain Taunton coming towards him, even
when he himself was most callous and unabashed, "he would rather turn
back and go any distance out of the way, than encounter those two
handsome, dark, bright eyes." Here it was that came, wha