Legends of the Black Watch; or, Forty-second HighlandersGrant, James
History
Legends of the Black Watch; or, Forty-second Highlanders
Grant, James
Great Britain. Army. Regiment of Foot, 42nd -- History -- Anecdotes
In the same spirit did he brood over the thousand trifles that the
lover treasures up in memory, and on none more than the love-music of
Lucy's voice, which he might never hear again.
Never again!--he shrank from those terrible words, and, trusting
through God's grace to escape the chances of the war that were before
him, he endeavoured to reckon over the days, the weeks, the months,
and it might be the years (oh what a prospect for a newly separated
lover!) that must pass, before he should again see the little
secluded kirk-hamlet, with its blue-slated manse, half buried among
the coppice; the Tweed brawling over its pebbled bed in front, under
the white-blossomed hawthorns and green bourtree foliage; the ancient
church with its stone spire, its old sepulchral yews, and black oak
pulpit, where for more than forty years the father of his Lucy had
ministered unto a poor but pious flock.
He was an old and white-haired pastor, whose memory went back to
those terrible times, when Scotland drew her sword for an oppressed
kirk and broken covenant--
"When the ashes of that covenant were scattered far and near,
And the voice spoke loud in judgment, which in love she would
not hear."
Adam White saw in fancy the dark oak pew, where on Sunday Lucy sat
near her father's pulpit, and close to a gothic window, from which
the sun, each morning in the year, cast the red glow of a painted
cross on her pure and snow-white brow; and so, with his mind full of
these things, with a tear in his eye and a prayer of hope on his lip,
"rocked on the stormy bosom of the deep," our military pilgrim went
to sleep in his cot, as the Lizard light faded away, and word went
round from ship to ship that Old England had sunk into the waste of
sky and water, far, far astern.
By the many casualties of foreign service, Adam White, on joining the
regiment in America, found himself junior captain.
It was now the spring of 1758, and George II. was King.
Lieutenant-General Sir Jeffry Amherst, K.C.B., was proceeding on the
second expedition against L'Isle Royale, now named Cape Breton, which
had belonged to the French since 1713, and was deemed by King Louis
the key to Canada and the Gulf of St. Lawrence.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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