ver it might be, he
went back to his duties in Bengal very soon after Napoleon had taken up
his residence at St. Helena, where Jos saw the ex-Emperor. To hear Mr.
Sedley talk on board ship you would have supposed that it was not the
first time he and the Corsican had met, and that the civilian had
bearded the French General at Mount St. John. He had a thousand
anecdotes about the famous battles; he knew the position of every
regiment and the loss which each had incurred. He did not deny that he
had been concerned in those victories--that he had been with the army
and carried despatches for the Duke of Wellington. And he described
what the Duke did and said on every conceivable moment of the day of
Waterloo, with such an accurate knowledge of his Grace's sentiments and
proceedings that it was clear he must have been by the conqueror's side
throughout the day; though, as a non-combatant, his name was not
mentioned in the public documents relative to the battle. Perhaps he
actually worked himself up to believe that he had been engaged with the
army; certain it is that he made a prodigious sensation for some time
at Calcutta, and was called Waterloo Sedley during the whole of his
subsequent stay in Bengal.

The bills which Jos had given for the purchase of those unlucky horses
were paid without question by him and his agents. He never was heard
to allude to the bargain, and nobody knows for a certainty what became
of the horses, or how he got rid of them, or of Isidor, his Belgian
servant, who sold a grey horse, very like the one which Jos rode, at
Valenciennes sometime during the autumn of 1815.

Jos's London agents had orders to pay one hundred and twenty pounds
yearly to his parents at Fulham. It was the chief support of the old
couple; for Mr. Sedley's speculations in life subsequent to his
bankruptcy did not by any means retrieve the broken old gentleman's
fortune. He tried to be a wine-merchant, a coal-merchant, a commission
lottery agent, &c., &c. He sent round prospectuses to his friends
whenever he took a new trade, and ordered a new brass plate for the
door, and talked pompously about making his fortune still. But Fortune
never came back to the feeble and stricken old man. One by one his
friends dropped off, and were weary of buying dear coals and bad wine
from him; and there was only his wife in all the world who fancied,
when he tottered off to the City of a morning, that he was still doing
any busi