precipice beneath sloped easily on to the fishing rock, and so a few steps more completed our path. I never saw a man more delighted than Johnstone. As being lighter and more active than he--for though not greatly advanced in life, he was considerably debilitated by severe wounds--I had to take some of the more perilous parts of the work on myself. I had cut the tenons for the ladder with a rope round my waist, and had recovered the trees flung into the sea by some adroit swimming; and the old soldier became thoroughly impressed with the conviction that my proper sphere was the army. I was already five feet three, he said; in little more than a twelvemonth I would be five feet seven; and were I then but to enlist, and to keep from the "drop drink"--a thing which he never could do--I would, he was certain, rise to be a serjeant. In brief, such were the terms on which Johnstone and I learned to live ever after, that, had I constructed a _score_ of traps for the Colonel's cattle, I believe he would have winked at them all. Poor fellow! he got into difficulties a good many years after, and, on the accession of the Whigs to power, mortgaged his pension, and emigrated to Canada. Deeming the terms hard, however, as he well might, he first wrote a letter to his old commander, the Duke of Wellington--I holding the pen for him--in which, in the hope that their stringency might be relaxed in his behalf, he stated both his services and his case. And promptly did the Duke reply, in an essentially kind holograph epistle, in which, after stating that he had no influence at the time with the Ministers of the Crown, and no means of getting a relaxation of their terms in behalf of any one, he "earnestly recommended William Johnstone, _first_, not to seek a provision for himself in Canada, unless he were able-bodied, and fit to provide for himself in circumstances of extreme hardship; and, _second_, on no account to sell or mortgage his pension." But the advice was not taken;--Johnstone did emigrate to Canada, and did mortgage his pension; and I fear--though I failed to trace his after history--that he suffered in consequence. CHAPTER VIII. "Now, surely, thought I, there's enou To fill life's dusty way; And who will miss a poet's feet, Or wonder where he stray! So to the woods and wastes I'll go, And I will build an ozier bower; And sweetly there to me shall flow The meditative hour."--HENRY KIRKE WHITE.