enduring service to the country he had loved
and served so faithfully, was Arthur Duke of
Wellington.

WHEN I SERVED IN THE MILITIA.

THE time?—more than twelve years ago.
The place?—a small dirty village on the
frontiers of Westphalia; a grey old church
with an apoplectic steeple, a churchyard filled
with turf-covered mounds, with the pastor's
cows grazing between them; a straw-roofed
parsonage on the one side, and a massive
stone building, with large windows and a tiled
roof on a gentle slope, on the other, surrounded
by a score or so of cottages, forming a very
dirty street and backed by orchards; behind
the church a woody hill, surmounted in the
distance by other hills; the green leaves just
shooting forth, and rooks and crows by the
hundred winging their way through the clear
racy air.

I sat on the stone seat by the door, doing
nothing. I looked at the hills and wished to
fly over them. I was in that foolish, romantic,
dozing mood in which boys will indulge at
that dangerous age when they are too old for
play, too active for study, and too young for
the serious business of life.

I was just touching upon twenty. So, as I
sat dreaming of wild journeys and adventures
in foreign lands, of caravans, robbers, bivouacs,
and fierce wars, I was suddenly awoke by the
rattling of a metal sheath upon the stones. I
looked up, and was at once brought back to
the realities of every-day Prussian life. A
very tall gendarme stood right before me.

These gendarmes exist still in Prussia,
but the cut of their dress has, within the
short space of twelve years, become matter
for history. Now, as well as then, the corps
of country gendarmes is recruited from the
regiments of the King's guard. They are all
tall, fine-looking, middle-aged men,
disseminated through the country districts and
placed at the disposition of the Landräthe.
They are a kind of mounted police in military
uniform, armed with pistols, carbines, and
troopers' swords. Steel-clattering, bristly-
bearded, rough-spoken men are they, and
very awful objects to small boys and full-
grown vagabonds.

The gendarme, standing before me, asked
my name. I had no reason to conceal it, and
besides, it was then in Prussia exactly as it is
now: he must be a bold man indeed who
refuses to answer any question which any one
in the King's livery chooses to ask.

"Becher is your name, is it?" said he
thoughtfully, looking over a large bundle of
small bits of coarse paper, which he produced,
Heaven knows from what mysterious depôt;
for the tail-coat of that time had no pockets.
"Becher, is it? Then," said he, singling out
one particular bit of grey paper, "this is for
you, and mind you attend to it."

Saying which, and placing the paper in my
hand, he turned upon his heel and marched
on right into the village.

"Mind you attend to it!" I was very ready
to do so; yearning as I was for excitement
and some change of scene. And when a
Prussian youth of my age receives a billet
from the hands of such a messenger, he may
be pretty certain that there will be some
extremely violent changes, both of scene and
circumstance, in store for him.

The paper was printed exactly like a
tax-paper, with here and there a name or
number in writing, exactly like a tax-paper too.
In fact it was a tax-paper. It summoned me to
pay my quotum towards the requirements of
the War-Office—with my person. It
commanded the p.p. Julius Becher—born at
Glogau in the year 1819, and now residing in
the commune of Müllenbach in the district of
Gummersbach, Government circle of Cologne,
and within the allotment of the twenty-ninth
regiment of the Landwehr—to appear on a
certain day before the Kreis-Ersatz Commission
at Gummersbach, to be then and there
dealt with according to the pleasure of the
said Commission. And the said Julius Becher
was specially admonished by a postscript, that
in case he failed to appear, or if he were
feloniously to absent himself, he would be
considered a deserter under such and such a
paragraph of the Military Code, supported
by another paragraph of the Landrecht;
and that he would be subject to certain
pains and penalties enumerated in the said
paragraphs.

I was quite bewildered. How could this
paper ever have found me? What could the
Commission, or the Landrath, or even the
Bürgermeister of the commune know about
me, my place of nativity, and the year of my
birth? It had so happened that my parents
having removed from Glogau when I was
very young to another town, which they
left when I was not much older, I had
been a temporary sojourner in all parts of
the kingdom; and, without any intention
of concealment, I still had reason to
believe that I was one of the lost children of
the Prussian State. I expected to see my
name gazetted some day or other among the
list of those who were wanted for the
conscription. My case was, indeed, an instance of
the watchfulness of the State. The register
of conscription had followed the vagabond
boy from place to place;—from Silesia to the
Baltic, and from the Baltic to the Rhine,
until the day on which the War-Office
could claim his body; and with that day
came the gendarme and the coarse, printed
tax-paper.

The care which the War-Office took to
collect all the recruits was wonderful. All
the young fellows of my age had the same
form of summons served upon them; placards
were posted on the church- doors, and charges
were delivered from the pulpits exhorting all
youths of twenty, who might have been