One of the personages of my tale I drew, however, with very little aid from fancy. I would go so far as to say that I took him from the life, if my memory did not confront me with the lamentable inferiority of my picture to the great original which it was meant to portray. With the exception of the quality of courage, I never met a man who contained within himself so many of the traits of Falstaff as the individual who furnished me with “Major Monsoon.” But the Major--I must call him so, though that rank was far beneath his own--was a man of unquestionable bravery. His powers as a story-teller were to my thinking unrivalled; the peculiar reflections on life which he would passingly introduce--the wise apothegms--were of a morality essentially of his own invention; he would indulge in the unsparing exhibition of himself in situations such as other men would never have confessed,--all blended up with a racy enjoyment of life, dashed occasionally with sorrow that our tenure of it was short of patriarchal. All these idiosyncracies, accompanied by a face redolent of intense humour and a voice whose modulations were managed with the skill of a consummate artist, were above me to convey; nor indeed, as I re-read any of the adventures in which he figures, am I other than ashamed at the weakness of my drawing and the poverty of my colouring. In order to show that I had a better chance to personify him than is usually the lot of a novelist,--that I possessed, so to say, a vested interest in his life and adventures,--I will relate a little incident; and my accuracy, if necessary, can be attested by another actor in the scene who yet survives. I was living a bachelor life at Brussels--my family being at Ostend for the bathing--during the summer of 1840. The city was comparatively empty, all the so-called society being absent at the various spas or baths of Germany. One member of the British Legation, who remained at his post to represent the mission, and myself, making common cause of our desolation and ennui, spent much of our time together and dined _tête-à-tête_ every day. It chanced that one evening, as we were hastening through the park on our way to dinner, we espied the Major--as “Major” I must speak of him--lounging about with that half-careless, half-observant air which indicated a desire to be somebody’s--anybody’s--guest rather than to surrender himself to the homeliness of domestic fare. * ‘Charles O’ Malley.’