e happy freedom of "Mufti"--no
pretended enjoyment of the incognito of a black coat and round hat; on
the contrary, the king's livery was borne with a pride which, erring
on the opposite side, suggested a degree of assumption and conscious
importance in the wearer, which more or less separated the soldier from
the civilian in bearing, and gradually originated a feeling of soreness
on the part of the more humbly clad citizen towards the more favoured
order.

A certain haughty, overbearing tone of manner, was then popular in the
army, and particularly in those regiments which boasted of an unalloyed
nobility among the officers. If they assumed an air of superiority to
the rest of the service, so much the more did they look down upon the
mere civilian, whom they considered as belonging to a very subordinate
class and order of mankind. To mark the sense of this difference of
condition in a hundred little ways, and by a hundred petty observances,
was part of a military education, and became a more unerring test of the
soldier in society, than even the cockade and the cross-belt. To suppose
that such a line of conduct should not have inspired those against whom
it was directed with a feeling of counter hatred, would be to disbelieve
in human nature. The civilian, indeed, reciprocated with dislike the
soldier's insolence, and, in their estrangement from each other, the
breach grew gradually wider--the dominant tyranny of the one, and the
base-born vulgarity of the other, being themes each loved to dilate upon
without ceasing.

Now, this consciousness of superiority, so far from relieving Frederick
Travers of any portion of the difficulty of his task, increased it
tenfold. He knew and felt he was stooping to a most unwarrantable piece
of condescension in seeking these people at all; and although he trusted
firmly that his aristocratic friends were very unlikely to hear of
proceedings in a quarter so remote and unvisited, yet how he should
answer to his own heart for such a course, was another and a far more
puzzling matter. He resolved, then, in the true spirit of his order, to
give his conduct all the parade of a most condescending act, to let them
see plainly, how immeasurably low he had voluntarily descended to meet
them; and to this end he attired himself in his full field uniform, and
with as scrupulous a care as though the occasion were a review before
his Majesty. His costume of scarlet coat, with blue velvet facings,