He used to talk to us of the young general’s calm face at Assaye, when he ordered forward the seventy-fourth regiment--the sergeant’s old corps--through the hurricane of Mahratta cannon fire to retrieve the mischief of the pickets’ reckless advance; and how, when the Mahratta batteries had been captured with a rush, the keen tulwars of the swarthy horsemen were slashing into the disordered ranks, until in the nick of time the eagle-eyed chief sped Maxwell’s light dragoons to the relief. Then he would speak of Wellington on the Busaco ridge; how, just as Loison’s supple Frenchmen had climbed the steep and rugged slope, and were re-forming on the edge of the upland, he gave the word to the Scottish regiment, which advanced at the double, halted, and poured in a volley, and then, bringing the bayonets down to the charge, literally pitchforked the Frenchmen headlong down the abrupt declivity. I think we used to like best to hear the sergeant tell of the desperate fighting in the storming of Peninsular fortresses besieged and taken by Wellington; of “the deadly breach in Badajos’s walls,” when the stormers leaped down into the ditch and struggled up the steep face of the battered masonry, only to find themselves confronted by the grim tiers of sword-blades projecting from massive beams, behind which stood drawn up the staunch defenders, sweeping the ascent with their musketry fire; of the fierce storm of Ciudad Rodrigo, where George Napier lay on the slope of the breach, struck down by the wound that shattered his arm, and still as he lay, waving his sword with his sound arm, and cheering on those whom his fall had for the moment caused to falter; of that strange quarter of an hour on the breach of Saint Sebastian, when the stormers, beaten back by the fire and steel of the serried defenders, lay down by order on the face of the breach, while Graham’s artillery played over them on the French masses defending the crown of it, the aim so fine that one of the leading men of the prostrate stormers, rashly raising his arm, had his hand carried away by a cannon-ball.