ense: and if you insist that, not being a hundred years
old, I cannot speak as an eye-witness of this historic scene, my
answer must be Browning's,--"All I can say is--I saw it!"]

"Gentlemen!" began the Major.

We might not all be officers, like the Mevagissey Artillery, but in
the Troy Gallants we were all gentlemen.

"Gentlemen!"--the Major waved an arm seaward--"yonder lies your
enemy. Behind you"--he pointed up the harbour to the town--
"England relies on your protection. Shall the Corsican tyrant lay
his lascivious hands upon her ancient liberties, her reformed and
Protestant religion, her respectable Sovereign and his Consort, her
mansions, her humble cottages, and those members of the opposite sex
whose charms reward, and, in rewarding, refine us? Or shall we meet
his flat-bottomed boats with a united front, a stern 'Thus far and no
farther,' and send them home with their tails between their legs?
That, gentlemen, is the alternative. Which will you choose?"

Here the Major paused, and finding that he expected an answer, we
turned our eyes with one consent upon Gunner Sobey, the readiest man
in the company.

"The latter!" said Gunner Sobey, with precision; whereat we gave
three cheers. We dined, that afternoon, in the Long Room of the
"Ship" Inn, and afterwards danced the night through in the Town Hall.

The Major danced famously. Above all things, he prided himself on
being a ladies' man, and the fair sex (as he always called them)
admired him without disguise. His manner towards them was gallant
yet deferential, tender yet manly. He conceded everything to their
weakness; yet no man in Troy could treat a woman with greater
plainness of speech. The confirmed spinsters (high and low, rich and
poor, we counted seventy-three of them in Troy) seemed to like him
none the less because he lost no occasion, public or private, of
commending wedlock. For the doctrine of Mr. Malthus (recently
promoted to a Professorship at the East India College) he had a
robust contempt. He openly regretted that, owing to the negligence
of our forefathers, the outbreak of war found Great Britain with but
fifteen million inhabitants to match against twenty-five million
Frenchmen. _They_ threatened to invade _us_, whereas _we_ should
rather have been in a position to march on Paris! He asked nothing
better. He quoted with sardonic emphasis the remark of a politician
that "'twas hardly worth while to go to war merely to