“May be,” said he--catching my eye in its wanderings, as he raised his own from the ground,--“May be a’d be better, gin a were doon i’ wun nain place.” I was vext to my soul that my look had spoken so plainly as to elicit this remark. Tell a man in a consumption that he looks charmingly, and you have opened the sluices of his heart almost as effectually, to your ingress, as if you had really cured him. And yet I think this poor fellow said what he did, rather to please one which he saw took an interest in him, than to flatter himself into a belief of recovery, or from any such existing belief; for, shortly after, when I asked him what he would do in Scotland, “A dunna ken wat a mun du,” he replied; “a canna du ony labouring wark, an’ a ha na goten ony trade; but, ye see, sir, we like ay to die whar’ wer’re born; and my faither, an’ my gran’faither afore him forbye, a’ my ither kin, an’ the mither that bore me, there a’ i’ the nook o’ ---- kirk-yaird; an’ than my wife an twa bairnies:”--There was a pause in the soldier’s voice; he had not learnt the drama of mendicity or sentimentality, but, by ----! there was a tear in his eye.[78]--I hate a scene as much as Byron did, but I admire a feeling heart, and pity a sorrowful one----the tear did not fall. I looked in his face when I heard his voice again; his eye glistened, and the lash was wet, but the tear was gone--And there stood I, whose slender body scarcely comprehended one half of the circumference of his muscular frame.--“And the hand of Death is here!” said I; and then I turned my eyes upon myself, and almost wondered how my soul dwelt in so frail a tenement, while his was about to escape from such a seeming fastness of flesh. After some further conversation, he told me his regiment had at one time been ordered off for Africa against the Ashantees; and sure never mortal man regretted counter orders on such grounds as he did those which balked his expectations of a visit to Sierra Leone.--“A thought,” said he, “wur regiment woud ha gien to Aifrica against the Aishantees--an a was in hopes it wud--it’s a didly climate, an’ there was nae money goten out o’ the laist fray; but thin--perhaps its jist as well to die in ae place as anither--but than we canna bring wursels to feel it, tho’ we may think it--an’ than ye see, sir, as a sid afore, a hae twa bairnies, an gin a’d laid doon wi’ the rast, the mither o’ them might hae goten the widow’s pension for them an’ hirsel.”--The widow’s pension! sixpence a-day for a woman and two children--and death to the fourth person as the only price of it! Hear this, shade of Lemprière! Manlius and the Horatii died to save a country, and to purchase earthly immortality by their deaths--but here’s a poor fellow willing to give up the ghost, by sword, plague, pestilence or famine, to secure a wife and two children two-pence each, per day!