While in Kilkenny we got a musician from a militia regiment to teach our band. He was a first-rate performer; but in saying so, I sum up all his good qualities, for a more ignorant mulish blockhead I never met with. Our officers, listening only to the sweet sounds which he elicited from the various instruments, thought he could not fail to make our band as good musicians as himself, and proud of his acquirements, they granted him every indulgence; but he had no more art in communicating his knowledge of the science to others, than the clarionet on which he played; and his morose, overbearing temper actually kept the regiment in a constant broil. Not a day passed, nay, scarcely an hour, without a complaint from him, against some one or another; and as those complaints were sometimes listened to, and the individuals complained of punished in some shape to please him, the life of a musician in the regiment was no enviable one. Among them was a young lad of the name of Reston, whose growing talent, in spite of every obstacle, threatened to outdo his master—this roused his jealousy, and he prohibited him, on various pretences, from the use of both music and instruments, by which he might have improved himself; but, not content with this, he tormented him by all the nameless methods which a superior in the army can, I am sorry to say, too often do with impunity. Poor Reston was known to the officers and his comrades as a boy of remarkably precocious talent, not in music alone, but in every thing; and naturally of a proud spirit, he could ill brook the insult and oppression which was heaped upon him, and seeing that his enemy was supported in every thing that he did, his mind was wrought up to desperation, and he deserted—taking his passage in a vessel from Dublin to Glasgow, where his parents resided.