Dick Duff, the lieutenant of our light company in 1812, was one of the happiest and most lively fellows in the British service. He sang and was merry from morning till night, and was occasionally uproarious from night till morning; and not even all the horrors of the retreat from Burgos could repress his flow of spirits. Moreover, he was the terror of innkeepers, and made the lazy hostaleros and keepers of posadas attend to his various commands with a celerity that astonished themselves; for Dick Duff could swear with marvellous fluency in Spanish and five other foreign languages; he had served at Malta, in Egypt, and Holland; and was wont to boast that he had acquired the whole vocabulary of oaths. This was highly necessary, Dick was wont to allege, "lest in a casual war of words with any ragamuffin on whom one might chance to be billeted, an officer and gentleman should have the disgrace of being put down by the sauce piquant of a rascally foreigner." Dick had joined the service as a full private in the year 1800, having been forced into the ranks by his chief or landlord. He was the second son of a respectable sheep farmer on the mountains of Mull, where his forefathers had resided for ages. His elder brother, Hamish, when a child, had been swept out to sea (while playing among the fisher-boats on the beach), and was drowned, to the grief and dismay of his parents, to whom a wandering Scottish priest, Father John of Douay, had foretold his birth, and predicted his future usefulness and greatness in the church. His mother, an old Catholic of the house of Keppoch, looked upon this elder child as blessed by Heaven, and in the fulness of her heart she gladly dedicated it to the then oppressed church of her forefathers, in token of which she had unavailingly tied to his neck a valuable _amulet_. Their landlord, like many other Scottish feudatories in the year 1800, became desirous of appearing a person of importance in the eyes of the Government; to this end he resolved to raise a kilted regiment among his tenants, and on procuring a letter of service, immediately called upon them for their sons. These tidings caused some consternation in Argyleshire, a county from which every war, prior to 1800, had swept at least _four thousand_ of its best men, few of whom ever survived to return. The aged father of Dick appeared with others before their feudal tyrant, who threatened to deprive every parent of his farm, if his sons delayed or declined to volunteer for service; and this can easily be done, as the Highland crofter has seldom a written lease to show, believing that the old hereditary cabin of his forefathers is his, as much as the air he breathes or the heather he treads on. "Duncan Duff," said the laird, who had already donned the uniform of colonel, "I am raising a regiment for the King's service, and must have your son Dick; he is a stout, active fellow, and here is the bounty." The old man wrung nis hands, and said--