I am by accident an only son. My mother, in two years after she had sworn obedience at the altar, presented her liege lord with a couple of pledges of connubial love, and the gender of both was masculine. Twelve years elapsed and no addition was made to the Hamiltons; when lo! upon a fine spring morning a little Benjamin was ushered into existence, and I was the God-send. My father never could be persuaded that there was a gentlemanly profession in the world but one, and that was the trade of arms. My brothers, as they grew up, entirely coincided with him in opinion, and both would be soldiers. William died sword in hand, crowning the great breach at Rodrigo; and Henry, after demolishing three or four cuirassiers of the Imperial Guards, found his last resting-place on "red Waterloo." When they were named, my father's eyes would kindle, and my mother's be suffused with tears. He played a fictitious part, enacted the Roman, and would persuade you that he exulted in their deaths; but my mother played the true one, the woman's. It was an autumnal evening, just when you smell the first indication of winter in a rarefied atmosphere, and see it in the clear curling of the smoke, as its woolly flakes rise from the cottage chimney and gradually are lost in the clear blue sky. Although not a cold evening, a log fire was extremely welcome. My father, Heaven rest him! had a slight touch in the toe of what finished him afterward in the stomach, namely, gout. "James," said my lady mother, "it is time we came to some decision regarding what we have been talking of for the last twelve months. Frank will be eighteen next Wednesday." "Faith! it is time, my dear Mary; the premises are true, but the difficulty is to come at the conclusion." "You know, my love, that only for your pension and half-pay, from the tremendous depreciation in agricultural property since the peace, we should be obliged to lay down the old carriage, as you had to part with the harriers the year after Waterloo." That to my father was a heavy hit. "It was a devil of a sacrifice, Mary,"--and he sighed, "to give up the sweetest pack that ever man rode to; one, that for a mile's run you could have covered with a blanket--heigh-ho! God's will be done;" and after that pious adjuration, my father turned down his tumbler No. 3, to the bottom. The memory of the lost harriers was always a painful recollection, and brought its silent evidence that the fortunes of the Hamiltons were not what they were a hundred years ago. "With all my care," continued my mother, "and, as you know, I economize to the best of my judgement, and after all is done that can be done, our income barely will defray the outlay of our household." "Or, as we used to say when I was dragooning thirty years ago, 'the tongue will scarcely meet the buckle,'" responded the colonel. "I have been thinking," said my mother timidly, "that Frank might go to the bar."