About forty years ago, in almost every village in Scotland might be seen tall, erect, gray-headed old men, retired veterans, who, after fighting the battles of their country in every quarter of the globe, had returned to the place of their birth, the memory of which had haunted them during long years of absence and exile. They were the leaders of public opinion in the small community in which they lived—the village Nestors, from whose lips dropped words of wisdom, tales of strange adventure, and dangers encountered by sea and land. They feared God and honoured the king; they had only one failing—an overweening love of the bottle; they were the oracles of every tap-room, where, amid the applause of their boon companions, they fought their battles o’er again, even to the thrice routing of all their foes and the thrice slaying of the slain. It was not the mere love of drink that led them there; mingled with this weakness was the pleasure of recalling scenes in which they had borne a part, battles in which they had fought and conquered. Often the schoolboys on the village green would cease from their sports and gather round one of these veterans in an admiring circle, as, seated beneath a shady tree and leaning on his crutch, he told of the gallant deeds of the Gordon Highlanders or the Old Black Watch. His rude eloquence never failed to awaken the enthusiasm of his audience, and many a Scottish soldier was first led to think of the profession of arms, and to long, like Norval, to follow some brave chieftain to the field, from listening to these veterans. They have now gone the way of all living; we know of only one veteran survivor of Waterloo in the North, but we can recal many who lived and flourished a quarter of a century ago. Old Hyderabad stands before us at this very moment. There he is, with all the towering majesty of six feet and some additional inches, with shaggy eyebrows and straggling hair as white as snow, with a rough, stern, but not unkindly face, rendered still more stern by a sabre-cut on the brow, with his formidable pikestaff in one hand, and his ram’s-horn “sneeshin’-mull,” or snuff-box, in the other. His real name was James Bruce, but he was universally known as Hyderabad, from the interminable stories he told of the capture of that Indian city, at which he assisted. His stories occasionally exceeded the bounds of credence; for example, he used to relate that any eccentricity of manner observable in his conduct arose from a singular accident which happened to him at Hyderabad. He was fighting his way through the streets, when a bullet-wound in the leg laid him prostrate; one of his assailants rushed upon him and laid open his skull with a cut of his sabre. “I put up my hand to my head,” said James, “to feel what was the matter; it so happened that I had just been takin’ a pinch and forgot to put up my mull. Aweel, you see, I was so startled at the size of the hole in my head that I lost hold of my