impotent spleen of men in power who had denied him the just recognition of his labours and his victories. They had showered peerages and baronetcies upon the heads of the leaders of the incomplete Punjaub campaign. On the victor of Scinde only the most trifling rewards had been bestowed, and now the people, always just in their final verdict, had reversed the award. Napier went for the last time to Celbridge. How strange it seems to him! How dwarfed it all is by the mighty battles through which the path of life has led him! The old scenes are there--the river, with its overhanging trees; the green fields, the fences, the terrace; the house where every window and door and wall holds some separate memory; the blue hill-tops along the southern horizon that used to be leagues distant, but now look close at hand, as though they had one and all shrunken in size. And so they have; because in after-life we look at each scene across many mounds, and a hundred beloved figures and faces of childhood rise up from the grave to dim our sight with tears. Back to Cheltenham again to the war against Directors and their confederates, and to other work too. There are many veterans "wearing out the thread" in the town, and they love to come to the old hero and retail their woes to him. No sending out of a shilling to the door by footman or valet, but a talk over old times, and kind words as well as money to these old, worn-out stop-bullets. "Poor old fellows," he writes, "it vexes me to see them so hard run for small comforts, and I am glad I came here, if it were only for the chats with them of old fights and hardships. They like this, but complain bitterly that old officers take no notice of them. When I see these shrivelled old men with age ploughed deep in their wrinkled old faces like my own, and remember the deeds they did with the bayonet, I sigh for ancient days when our bodies were fit for war. I remember these men powerful and daring in battle, for they are mostly my own soldiers." With Napier there was no such thing as a "common soldier"; the man who went out and fought and marched and toiled was a hero--a private soldier hero if you will, but a hero all the same. The whole gorge of the man rose at the thought that the men who had bled for England should die in an English poorhouse; that there were thousands and tens of thousands who rolled in carriages, and drew dividends, and made long speeches in Parliament, and ate truffles and turtle, because these wizened old scarecrows had in days gone by charged home, or stood like stone walls under murderous storms of grape and musketry, or climbed some slippery breach amid the mangled bodies of their comrades.