"After all, his rider's fate is seldom better in the end," said the corporal, "and I don't think either you or I, Tom, will have our tombs in Westminster Abbey. But bring the brandy; confound care and reflection; let us live while we can and be jolly, too!" I rode each of their horses alternately after we crossed the Border, as we proceeded southward, along the road towards the Rectory. My comrades were rather silent now, and I was often left to my own reflections. The day was gloomy and lowering, and the wind came in gusts; dark clouds rolled in masses across the grey, sullen sky; the distant Cheviot hills looked brown and sombre; but nature's aspect failed to impress me with gloom as on the preceding day. I felt a glow of new enthusiasm kindling in my heart. The hopes inspired by ambition, pride, and all a boy's visions of military pomp and glory, grew strong within me. To wear a fine uniform--to ride a showy horse--to be a captain in a year--to return to the village--to marry Ruth--and to flaunt my finery before the people, were my most prominent ideas. A year? Amid all this, I remembered that my dashing comrade, Jack Charters, spoke of having been a soldier for ten years, and was only a corporal still! This was far from encouraging; but then I should be certain to prove so much more sober, steady, and industrious than Jack; and so I rode on scheming out my future career, with great brilliance and rapidity, and much to my own satisfaction. I was full of such thoughts when we reached the gate of the Rectory, which was a quaint old building, having its deeply embayed and mullioned windows nearly hidden by luxuriant masses of ivy, vine and clematis. It was small, and covered simply with bright yellow thatch; but its walls were thick and strong, though they had often been subjected to fire by the invading Scots, in the stormy times of old. We left the horses at the gothic porch, and, by a servant in livery, were ushered into the library, where the Rector was seated at luncheon, with a decanter of port before him, and he had been evidently dozing over his books and papers. To attest recruits at once, without the many formalities of medical inspections and so forth, was common in those days, and for long after. Had it been otherwise, the public would never have been favoured with the memoirs of Phœbe Hassel, who served seven years in H. M. 5th Foot, or of Mrs. Christian Davis, another woman, who served in all the battles of Marlborough, as a trooper in the Scots Greys, who had her head fractured by the splinter of a shell at Ramillies, and who enjoyed a pension of one shilling per diem till she died, and was buried with military honours in the ground belonging to Chelsea Hospital.* * "Records of the Scots Greys," pp. 49-51. Phœbe Hassel was alive at Brighton in 1821. She served in the West Indies, and at Gibraltar.