Yet even in the British military service the aphorism occasionally holds good, that everything comes to him who knows how to wait. Colin Campbell, the half-pay colonel of 1854, was a full general in 1858 and a peer of the realm in the same year; in 1862 he was gazetted a field-marshal. In less than nine years the half-pay colonel had attained the highest rank in the service,--a promotion of unique rapidity apart from that conferred on soldiers of royal blood. Along with Lord Clyde were gazetted field-marshals Sir Edward Blakeney and Lord Gough, both of whom were lieutenant-generals of some twenty years' standing when Colin Campbell was merely a colonel. Sir John Burgoyne, almost immeasurably his senior in 1854, did not become a field-marshal until 1868. Colin Campbell was born in Glasgow on the 20th of October 1792, the eldest of the four children of John Macliver, the Glasgow carpenter, and his wife Agnes Campbell. How Colin Macliver came to bear the name of Colin Campbell will presently be told. The family had gone down in the world, but Colin Campbell came of good old stock on both sides of the house. His grandfather, Laird of Ardnave in the island of Islay, had been out in the Forty-five and so forfeited his estate. General Shadwell, the biographer of Colin Campbell, states that his mother was of a respectable family which had settled in Islay near two centuries ago with its chief, the ancestor of the existing Earls of Cawdor. But the Campbell who was the ancestor of the Cawdors was a son of the second Earl of Argyle who fell at Flodden in 1513, and he belonged to the first half of the sixteenth century; so that, since Colin Campbell's maternal family settled in Islay with its chief, it could reckon a longer existence than that ascribed to it by General Shadwell. Not a few of Colin Campbell's kinsmen had served in the army; and the uncle after whom he was christened had fallen as a subaltern in the war of the American Revolution.