ly; but when I reached
Colchester (the place, as the reader will probably recollect, where I
commenced "soldiering"), all the gambols and tricks I had played there
when a boy, rushed upon my mind, and the place seemed endeared to me by
a thousand recollections. Such was my wish to re-explore this place,
that I forfeited my coach-hire for the rest of the journey, and stopped
there that night. Early on the following morning I sauntered along to
the lanes that stood in the vicinity of the barracks, and, on coming to
a certain lane that ran behind them, where we went every day to
practice, I found my name still on a stile. This had been cut by me when
I frequented the place as a little fifer, twelve years before. Such were
my feelings on this simple occasion, that I could scarcely restrain a
tear, and I sat on the stile for an hour, looking on my own name a
hundred times over. It will not, therefore, be wondered at, if the eye
of a fond father should fondly linger on the spot where he took leave
of, and last saw his motherless babe.

The scene before me in the vessel soon diverted me from the
contemplation of all other subjects. I could have brooded over the fate
of my dear little ones the whole night; but the din and tumult of more
than two hundred soldiers, with their friends from shore, all rioting in
the cup of inebriety, tumbling over each other, blaspheming, fighting,
singing, fifing, and fiddling, and all huddled together in a confined
space, with their beds, bedding, parrots, minors, and other birds,
roused me to a lively sense of the scene before me.

On the following morning we bade farewell to Fort William, under whose
proud battlements we had been lying. The wind was serene and fair, and
the wave had scarcely a ripple on its silvery surface. Would that my
bosom had been equally composed and tranquil; but my heart sickened
within me when I felt the beautiful ship smoothly gliding down the rapid
stream, and bearing me from that country and that service in which I had
spent the prime of my life, and, I may say, the happiest of my days. The
rapid Ganges soon bore me from the sight of the English flag, and I
dropped a tear to the recollection of the many happy days I had spent at
Fort William.

I soon found that I had a queer set to deal with, without the means of
checking any indiscretion that drunkenness might drive them to commit.
The captain commanding the detachment was in a dying state, and indeed
did die on