midnight and steal a minute cutting of lead from
each diamond pane of its windows, that we
may make of such cuttings a heart of lead for
cure of sickness. There is too much of the
heart of lead, too little of the golden heart that
brings men health, in such credulity.

       THE BUCKINGHAMSHIRE MAN.

A BULLET that "had really killed a man"
at Waterloo, was one of my playthings when
a boy.

That bullet was as terrible in my eyes, and
as much a fetish, as the spotted snake that "had
really killed a man" in India, that we kept in
spirits in a long bottle on the top of a bookcase.
As that snake represented in mine eyes
the whole India of snakes, cane brakes, jungle
clumps, plain and mountain, Deccan and Punjab,
irom Cashmere to Cape Comorin, so was
that dull little battered leaden bullet a sort of little
sphere which became transparent as I looked,
and disclosed embattled nations, in all the
shock and grapple of mortal contest, or pouring
along in headlong rout, with torn colours,
broken weapons, and shattered gun-
carriages.

My next step, after a personal taste of single
combat at school, was to discover a man who
had really been in a battle. I found him in no
less a person than our old gardener, who did
not seem to be especially proud of it, and took
it very much as a matter of course. There
was nothing specially divine about the man as
he leant on his spade, cleaned it with a wooden
scraper, and put a fresh plug of tobacco in his
cheek; no special lustre lit his eye: he had been
"baptised in fire," as Napoleon called it. Now
I saw no special result produced by such a
ceremony, but it is all in him, I thought, full
of my Thermopylæs and Marathons, Bannockburns
and Zutpheus, and my shocks of spears
and clouds of arrows—it is all in him. He is
as a cask of very precious liquor, and I am the
spigot that is to let it out. I shall now know
what I have long thirsted to know—the feelings
of one's first battle, and the details of what is
actually done.

"Ranger," said I, with all the earnestness of
fourteen, talking to him as if he was on oath,
"did you ever shoot a man in battle?"

This I thought was quietly breaking the
ground, and laying it open for innumerable tales
of bloodshed. He spoke, after a minute, during
which he looked down at the fresh mould, then
up at the blue sky.

"Well," said he, "Master Joe, not as I
exactly knows on; but I've fired into the thick
on 'em a score of times."

I was disappointed at the time, and began to
suspect there was no poetry in life if it was not
to be found in a battle; but when I began to turn
it over, I think the answer was not so bad.

Yes, into the thick on 'em. I can see 'em
now—rows of broad-topped shakos and red side-
plumes, and eyes and mouths, fierce, black with
biting the cartridges. Twist and ram the grape.
Fire! one man falls on his knees—another
staggers; and two more hide their eyes; for, they
are shot in the face. Closing up to the front,
fresh men step in their places. Charge! away
goes the level line of bayonet with three cheers.
The French reel they break. The colours are
taken—they fly—victory!

True, I have ludicrous images of the Finsbury
volunteers, of their ramshackled march, their
intermittent fire, the ravages they make of poultry
in their marches, of their general cumbrous and
inefficient look. No wonder the local militia
used to be called "The Locusts," for they
cleared the country. Then the Yeomanry, and
their dusty triumphal entrance once a year into
Diddleton, shall I ever forget? No charge of
Cromwell's could have emptied more saddles
than a wheeling manœuvre used to on field-
days; and as for the fat major, how his hat used
to blow off, and how the colonel's horse, if he
ever dismounted, used always to break away!
How hot and dusty they always were, how they
seemed bursting through their dragoon-tail
jackets, how those huge swords used to chink
about the streets, how the gallant men used to
bray and drink! The city, while the Yeomanry
were there, seemed as if it had just been sacked
in a most comfortable way.

A good old country gentleman I once knew
told three times a day for forty years his
adventures when he served in the City Light Horse
Volunteers, a gallant corps, indeed, of City men,
light perhaps on horseback, but I should think
unsurpassably heavy in conversation, to judge
by my friend. He lived in his early heroism, left
his sword and sabretasche hung up in his study
to provoke remarks, had regular traps and means
to lead on to his stories, and always began them
by swelling out his chest, perking up his chin,
and saying, "I once drew my sword in defence
of my country." His forced march to Ealing
(like Major Sturgeon's) surpassed Napoleon's
attack of Lodi, and the return to Hackney was
something like the retreat from Moscow,
only shorter, and in the summer. If that
gallant corps—and I say it advisedly—had
had the opportunities the regulars had, they
would have done gallant things, but they
hadn't.

The other day I chanced to meet an old
militiaman who was great in the old days,
and in the bygone glories of Howe and the
Dukes of Buckingham. I met him in a railway
carriage thus:

I was on my way to Ireland, to establish a
company for "Draining the Bogs of Allan in
search of a Danish Treasure," which had been
recommended to me as a good thing to invest
money in.

I had refused to buy an "illustrious Moore;" I
had been driven at "by your leave" by plough-
ing perambulating trucks full of luggage; I had
had my ticket nipped by something between a
dentist's key and a cork-presser; I had at last
taken my seat in a second-class carriage,
arranged my plaid, and laid my Times in a sort of