People say he is mad.  Just leave the doors of
the jewel-office open, and see how soon my
acquaintance Colonel Blood (from Camberwell)
will steal the regalia.  All these types always
exist.  The Causes Célèbres are musty, decayed
volumes; yet in peaceable English
homesteads there are the same poisoners now.
The Borgias are alive in gingham and corduroy;
the aqua tofana is brewed in earthen
mugs, and bought, in penn'orths, at the
chemists; every burial club may have its
Brinvilliers; every assurance office knows
who killed Sir Thomas Overbury, and how
Sir Theodosius Boughton's uncle insured
his wife's sister's life for five thousand
pounds.

The great event of the day— the war— has
called into being a class of characters who,
owing to the cankers of a calm world and a
long peace, have gradually faded from public
view, and have been superseded by younger
sons of younger brothers, decayed tapsters,
and reduced serving-men.  Captain Dugald
Dalgetty who since the last great peace has
been annually sinking deeper and deeper into
the stagnant waters of Lethe ; who has
gradually fallen into neglect, mis-esteem,
obscurity, ridicule, and at length total oblivion ;
who seemed to have strutted and fretted his
hour upon the stage till the impatient audience
cried " Out ! out (or " Off, off ! "), brief candle ! "
has suddenly, Belli gratiâ, re-appeared blooming,
confident, swaggering, loquacious, valiant,
and venally faithful — with a new scabbard to
his Andrea Ferrara, new rivets to his corselet,
a fresh feather in his hat, new spurs to his
heels, and a new saddle and bridle to his
doughty steed Gustavus Adolphus.  The war
has called forth many things that have been
slumbering for a quarter of a century in the
limbo of peace-pipings.  The passions of
wild beasts, plunder, provost-marshals, and
baggage-waggon Moll Flagons :— Bellona can
boast of all these in her train ; and with them
rides proudly with his long sword ready to
thrust for king or kaiser, autocrat or republic,
stars or stripes, lion and unicorn or double
eagle, Captain Dugald Dalgetty.

I can just recollect, nearly twenty years ago,
one of the old Dalgetty stock, Captain Skanderbeggle.
He lived next door to us, in a
little cottage at Kilburn.  He had but one
leg ;  he had a potato snuff-box, given to him
—  so he said— by General Barclay de Tolly ;
and his principal occupation was to walk up
and down his little garden, and swear.  He
is associated in my mind, curiously, with a
certain tall sunflower in his garden that
used to swagger insolently over our palings.
Not that his face was yellow— it was excessively
red.  Not that his face had no
better supporter than a stalk :  for the
captain's face ended in a shiny black
stock, and was finished off by a tightly-buttoned
blue surtout and nankeen trousers;
but both the flower and the man were arrogant,
blustering, self-asserting, swayed themselves
to-and-fro a great deal, and had an
unmistakeable expression of a resolve not to
stand any nonsense.  Captain Skanderbeggle
was good enough to take considerable notice
of, and rather a fancy to, me; but he would
not stand any of my nonsense either, and, if
I were inattentive to the terrific stories he
told me, he would hit me a smart cuff on the
side of the head, which I never dared resent
or complain of to my nurse, for my ideas of
the captain's coercive powers over refractory
juveniles were illimitable.  He was more
than a threat of Bogey to me;— he was one
of the Bogies themselves.

A martial life had the captain led.  He was
of West Indian parentage— from Demerara.
"Married a Dutch widow, sir," he was wont
to say; "fifty thousand guilders, and five
hundred black fellows.  Too much sangaree!
Cut up with the yellow fever in six months.
Clck!"  (this last interjection, "Clck!" he
always made use of as a peroration to his
narratives, whether he had been describing a
battle, a shipwreck, or a night surprise, the
passage of a river, or the execution of a
deserter.)  Captain Skanderbeggle had received
his baptism of fire in some bush-fighting
among runaway slaves in the interior
of Guiana.  "Lay three days and nights in
the mud up a creek.  Took twenty-seven
prisoners, hanged nine, gave the 'Spanso
bocko' to eight, and flogged and pickled the
rest.  Took 'Ugly Toby' the ringleader.
Brought his head home in a calabash. Promoted
to be captain of militia on the spot.
Governor Flemsburg sitting under a banyan
tree smoking his pipe.  Commission made out
there and then.  Clck!"  From the West
Indies, the captain (he had always been a
captain),  having converted his fifty thousand
guilders into the familiar ornithological specimen
known as ducks and drakes, came to
Europe, and appeared to have held some
irregular military employment in Ireland
during the rebellion in that unhappy country.
He used to speak with great gusto of
certain people called Croppies, and of the
scourging, half-hanging, pitch-capping, and
gunpowder-singeing, that were necessary to
instil proper notions of loyalty and the Protestant
religion into their minds ; whence I
infer that he had been in the Militia or the
Yeomanry.  Indeed, I think he once told me
that he was adjutant in Lord Jocelyn's Fox-hunters ;
a corps that unearthed innumerable
rebellious foxes (without brushes, and
with but two legs) in those parlous times.
But, as he was always desirous of employment
in the regular army, he had solicited
and obtained a commission in the King's
German Legion, whence he had passed to
Lord Beresford's Portuguese Levies, and
thence to Sir Hudson Lowe's Corsican Rangers,
during his service in which he had the pride
and pleasure to put an end to a deadly Corsican
vendetta that had been raging for
upwards of eighteen months; for, happening