While de Boufflers was discussing with Marlborough the terms of capitulation, the other French Generals, thinking that the Duke was as much worn out by the campaign as they were themselves, sent their men into winter quarters and went off to Paris. But they reckoned without their host. Marlborough sprang at Ghent, and invested it, repulsed a great sortie on Christmas Day, and accepted the surrender of the garrison on January 2, 1709. The French troops in Bruges did not wait to be attacked, but abandoned the town and citadel: and then, but not till then, the Allies were allowed to disperse to their winter quarters. During the greater part of the year 1708 the regiment was deprived of the services of the adjutant, Captain Robert Parker, who was specially selected to act as instructor in discipline and drill to the regiments at that time quartered in Ireland. To any officer the compliment would have been great; but in Parker’s case it was especially flattering, because he was a self-made man who had risen from the ranks. His story is an interesting one. His father was a farmer near Kilkenny, where the boy was sent to a school which boasted of a company of cadets (as we should now call them), who were “armed with wooden guns and took great delight in marching and exercising.” These cadets must have been a remarkable set of lads, as more than thirty of them obtained commissions, and some indeed became General officers. Parker soon discovered that soldiering was the trade for him, and running away from home, enlisted in an independent company commanded by Captain Frederick Hamilton, the future Colonel of the XVIIIth Regiment. During the Tyrconnel troubles both Hamilton and Parker were disbanded, but April, 1689, found them in Meath’s regiment, the one a major, the other a full private. Parker joined with a strong determination to get on in his profession. “I determined to be very circumspect in my behaviour, by which I gained the esteem of my Major and most of the officers of the regiment. I applied myself diligently to the use of arms, and soon became expert in it.” Whether he had risen to be a sergeant in the Irish wars is not known: all he tells us about himself at that time is that at Athlone in throwing up an entrenchment he “received a favourable shot on the crown of the head; the ball only grazed on a good thick skull and went off”; and that at the end of the siege he was much injured by a stone dropped on him by the defenders of the castle. He must have been a non-commissioned officer in 1695; desperately wounded at Namur, he found when he returned to duty after seven months in hospital, that he had been gazetted to a commission, with seven ensigns junior to him. Eleven years later he was Captain-Lieutenant and Adjutant, and after receiving at Menin “a contusion on the side of the head which was likely to be fatal,” was promoted to be captain of the grenadier company. Parker was so successful in disciplining