itter of recognition, as you see a bayonet shining out of an ambush; but
each party fell back, when everything was again dark.

"And you, _mon capitaine_, where have you been?" says Esmond, turning away
the conversation from this dangerous ground, where neither chose to
engage.

"I may have been in Pekin," says he, "or I may have been in Paraguay--who
knows where? I am now Captain von Holtz, in the service of his electoral
highness, come to negotiate exchange of prisoners with his highness of
Savoy."

'Twas well known that very many officers in our army were well-affected
towards the young king at St. Germains, whose right to the throne was
undeniable, and whose accession to it, at the death of his sister, by far
the greater part of the English people would have preferred, to the having
a petty German prince for a sovereign, about whose cruelty, rapacity,
boorish manners, and odious foreign ways, a thousand stories were current.
It wounded our English pride to think, that a shabby High-Dutch duke,
whose revenues were not a tithe as great as those of many of the princes
of our ancient English nobility, who could not speak a word of our
language, and whom we chose to represent as a sort of German boor, feeding
on train-oil and sauerkraut, with a bevy of mistresses in a barn, should
come to reign over the proudest and most polished people in the world.
Were we, the conquerors of the Grand Monarch, to submit to that ignoble
domination? What did the Hanoverian's Protestantism matter to us? Was it
not notorious (we were told and led to believe so) that one of the
daughters of this Protestant hero was being bred up with no religion at
all, as yet, and ready to be made Lutheran or Roman, according as the
husband might be, whom her parents should find for her? This talk, very
idle and abusive much of it was, went on at a hundred mess-tables in the
army; there was scarce an ensign that did not hear it, or join in it, and
everybody knew, or affected to know, that the commander-in-chief himself
had relations with his nephew, the Duke of Berwick ('twas by an
Englishman, thank God, that we were beaten at Almanza), and that his grace
was most anxious to restore the royal race of his benefactors, and to
repair his former treason.

This is certain, that for a considerable period no officer in the duke's
army lost favour with the commander-in-chief for entertaining or
proclaiming his loyalty towards the exiled family. When the Chevali