uniform opened.

"Dear Doubledick,--I am dying."

"For the love of Heaven, no! Taunton! My preserver, my guardian angel,
my witness! Dearest, truest, kindest of human beings! Taunton! For God's
sake!"

To listen to that agonised entreaty as it started from the trembling
and one could almost have fancied whitened lips of the Reader, was to
be with him there upon the instant on the far-off battle-field. Taunton
dies "with his hand upon the breast in which he had revived a soul."
Doubledick, prostrated and inconsolable in his bereavement, has but two
cares seemingly for the rest of his existence--one to preserve a packet
of hair to be given to the mother of the friend lost to him; the other,
to encounter that French officer who had rallied the men under whose
fire that friend had fallen. "A new legend," quoth the narrator, "now
began to incubate among our troops; and it was, that when he and the
French officer came face to face once more, there would be weeping in
France." Failing to meet him, however, through all the closing scenes
of the great war, Doubledick, by this time promoted to his lieutenancy,
follows the old regimental colours, ragged, scarred, and riddled with
shot, through the fierce conflicts of Quatre Bras and Ligny, falling at
last desperately wounded--all but dead--upon the field of Waterloo.

How, having been tenderly nursed during the total eclipse of an
appallingly lengthened period of unconsciousness, he wakes up at last in
Brussels to find that during a little more than momentary and at first
an utterly forgotten interval of his stupor, he has been married to the
gentle-handed nurse who has been all the while in attendance upon him,
and who is no other, of coarse, than his faithful first love, Mary
Marshall! How, returning homewards, an invalided hero, Captain
Doubledick becomes, in a manner, soon afterwards, the adopted son of
Major Taunton's mother! How the latter, having gone, some time later, on
a visit to a French family near Aix, is followed by her other son, her
other self, he has almost come to be, "now a hardy, handsome man in
the full vigour of life," on his receiving from the head of the house
a gracious and courtly invitation for "the honour of the company of cet
homme si justement celebre, Monsieur le Capitaine Richard Double-dick!"
These were among the incidents in due sequence immediately afterwards
recounted!

Arriving at the old chateau upon a fete-day, when the household are
s