Moreover, a dragoon accoutred cannot lie on his back for the spurs that are on his heels, and the cartridge-box between his shoulders, nor on his right side for his haversack, nor on his left for his canteen and sword-hilt; thus, when harnessed, he has no resource but to sleep on his face with his nose and toes in the turf! So the dreary night would pass--the trumpet pour its melancholy twang through the mist at daybreak, and amid the pestilential swamp we would groom our horses or imagine that we did so; pour the water out of our boots; partake of a ration biscuit soaked by the night rain to pulp, if nothing better could be had; denounce the Hanoverians for whom we, H.M. Scots Greys, endured all this discomfort, and then again resume the march, which ended on the 31st of September, when we joined Prince Ferdinand at Coesveldt, a small but fortified town in Westphalia. On those long marches, Tom Kirkton--he had now attained the rank of troop-sergeant--and I had many a confab as of old, for on service rank makes little difference, if discipline be retained. He frequently and bluntly urged that I should "lay siege," as he phrased it, "to my pretty cousin, and marry her, and so quit this miserable work. Lay siege!" he added, on one occasion; "you don't require to do that, for I have no doubt she is anxious enough to hook you for the mere sake of being Lady Gauntlet." "This is most flattering, Tom; and so you would have me pander to a spirit so mercenary. Nay, nay; I cannot judge of her thus; and by this time perhaps she is the wife of Major Shirley, whom I left in possession of the field." But Tom's advice, though heedlessly given, always rankled long and bitterly in my mind. And now, lest the reader may naturally inquire what object we had in making a tour of Germany, I may briefly state that his Britannic Majesty's native and well-beloved Electorate of Hanover had been overrun by a French army, to expel whom, Prince Ferdinand of Brunswick had put himself at the head of the German troops, and to reinforce these, six regiments of British infantry and some cavalry had joined him, and were now under the command of Lord George Sackville. Since the accession of the house of Guelph to the throne, the whole taxes and energies of the British people had been systematically devoted to the defence of Hanover and the pauper princelings of Germany; just as in the preceding age they had been wasted in defence of King William's dearly-beloved Dutch; and it was not until the peace of Paris that, as an historian says, the nation "would no longer suffer the public treasure to be squandered on poor foreign princes under the name of subsidies, to enable them to fight their own battles, nor the blood of British soldiers to be spilt to water the forests and fertilize the plains of Germany."