HE REAL SOLDIER

After travelling some days, they came across a real soldier seated at
the side of the road, and Bill at once persuaded the King to invite so
valuable a man to join their expedition. The King therefore left his
chariot and approached him, and asked the noble-looking fellow if he
would care to make one of their party, and, if so, whether he had a good
character from his last general, and the old warrior replied:--

'Allow me, my good sirs, to recite to you one of my most noteworthy
achievements, one of which, peradventure, you may not have read in the
numerous books filled with accounts of my exploits. I shall thus remove
any trace of doubt that may linger in your minds as to my great courage
and astute generalship.'

All expressing their eagerness to hear the story, the wordful old
warrior proceeded:--

'As near as I can remember, it was in the early fifties when, a mere
drummer-boy, with the bloom of early boyhood still gracing my brave
young cheek, I marched with the gallant 53rd or, as you may possibly
know them, the King's Own Royal Roebucks, to the relief of the Isle of
Wight. This island, at the time I mention, was blockaded by that
notorious filibuster, Reginald Bendbrisket, a rogue who, possessed of
the greatest audacity and cunning, had earned for himself an unenviable
reputation, from Margate to Samoa, by the terrible extent of his
depredations.

'You will all doubtless remember how, disappointed in his endeavours to
usurp the throne of Pitcairn Island, he had impudently resolved to make
a sudden raid upon the Isle of Wight; and thus to feed his own
insatiable greed and, at the same time, appease the disappointed rage of
his desperate followers, he would have plunged the peaceful little
island into abject misery. What tempted him thereto none can guess with
any certainty, unless indeed it were the many false reports, spread
abroad by the unscrupulous, of the gold, silver, and diamonds to be
found there; of the extensive quarries, rich in the finest hearthstone;
and of the natural paraffin springs, that could provide the world with
the purest oil; and many other reports, alike false and discreditable to
their inventor and to those who repeated them to the credulous stranger.

'Had the rogue been successful in his latest raid, his small band of
followers (mayhap increased to a powerful army by the hordes of
discontented periwinkle-gatherers, prawners, and lobster-potterers that
earn a sc