Mars, however, was still in the ascendant, for my first transaction in the way of business was to get myself appointed to a lieutenancy in one of the volunteer regiments, and, as far as I remember, I think that all my other transactions while I remained there redounded more to my credit as a soldier than as a citizen, and when, at the end of the year, the offer of an ensigncy in the militia enabled me to ascend a step higher on the ladder of my ambition, leaving my partner to sell or burn his sticks (whichever he might find the most profitable), I cut mine, and joined that finest of all militia regiments, the North York, when I began to hold up my head and to fancy myself something like a soldier in reality. Our movements during the short period that I remained with them, were confined to casual changes among the different stations on the coasts of Kent and Sussex, where I got gradually initiated into all the mysteries of home service,--learnt to make love to the smugglers' very pretty daughters, and became a dead hand at wrenching the knocker from a door. The idleness and the mischievous propensities of the officers of that district (of the line as well as the militia) were proverbial at the period I speak of; but, while as usual the report greatly exceeded the reality, there was this to be said in their behalf, that they were almost entirely excluded from respectable society; owing partly, perhaps, to their not being quite so select as at the present time, (those heroes who had a choice of pleasures preferring Almack's to Napoleon's balls,) but chiefly to the numbers of the troops with which those districts were inundated during the war, and which put it out of the power of individual residents to notice such a succession of military interlopers, unless they happened to be especially recommended to them; so that, as the Irishman expresses it--he was a lucky cove indeed who in those days succeeded in getting his legs under a gentleman's mahogany. It is not therefore much to be wondered at, if a parcel of wild young fellows thrown on their own resources, when that warlike age required a larking spirit to be encouraged rather than repressed amongst them,--I say, it is not to be wondered at if they did occasionally amuse themselves with a class of persons which, under other circumstances, they would have avoided, and if the consequences were sometimes what they had better not have been--but the accounts between the man and woman of that day having been long since closed, it is not for me to re-open them, yet I remember that even that manner of life was not without its charms.