If, among the anecdotes which I have introduced, the eye of criticism may detect many which may be deemed of too trivial a nature, and devoid of that piquancy which can alone confer a value on such light and unimportant materials, I can only plead that I may have been led to over-estimate their merit, from the hearty laughter which they created when they were first noted by me; and I trust it will be recollected that it is a rough soldier who has ventured to think them worthy of publicity. So, also, if in my account of the battles and sieges in which I have had the honour to participate, my details shall appear flimsy or meagre, more especially as concerns the objects of the government of India in the various campaigns in which I have been engaged, be it remembered that I do not profess to know their designs; that my constant occupation in my professional duties afforded me no time to study them; and that it is the subaltern's duty to act, and not to reason. My Memoirs, such as they are, I leave to the indulgent consideration of a liberal public. JOHN SHIPP. BHURTPORE COTTAGE, ALPHA ROAD, REGENT'S PARK, _January, 1829_. MEMOIRS OF JOHN SHIPP. CHAPTER I. In the ponderous mouldy register of the little market-town of Saxmundham, in the county of Suffolk--covered with the red remnants of the old worn-out velvet pulpit-cushion of the said village church, into which the Christian religion had been beaten and enforced, both with clenched fist and pointed elbow, and which now plainly told the congregation that it had at last yielded only to Parson Brown's impressive manner and arguments--in this prodigious volume, protected by huge brass clasps, which naught but the rough hand of the man of skulls[2] could force to obedience, after the oft-wetted thumb had aroused some hundreds of gigantic leaves from their peaceful slumber, and the book had opened wide its time-worn pages, there was, and, I doubt not, is still to be discovered, a plainly-written record, setting forth, in most intelligible terms, that I, John Shipp, the humble author of these Memoirs, came into this wicked and untoward generation on the 16th day of March, A.D. 1785. If this register be an authentic enrolment, which I have neither reason nor inclination to doubt, I was the second son of Thomas and Laetitia Shipp--persons of honest fame, but in indigent circumstances, who had both "drank deep" of the cup of sorrow. Of the latter of those dear parents I was bereft in my infancy; and, as my father was a soldier in a foreign clime, thus was I thrown on the world's tempestuous ocean, to buffet with the waves of care, and to encounter the breakers of want.