Old John touched his brow with his forefinger significantly, and James muttered to himself—“The wound in his head may have damaged the sergeant-major, to be sure,—but, it is his daughter, poor thing, for all the roses on her cheek, and her sweet voice—!” John did not hear a word his comrade spoke, but his thoughts were in the same channel. “He loves to see us all the same,” he said, “as when he was with the old ‘half-hundred,’ and takes a march through the college every morning, keeping wonderful count of our victories; and then mounts guard over his daughter, as regularly as beat of drum;—he’s constant with her; if the sun’s too hot, under the shade of the avenue trees; or, if it is too cold, in the warmth of Cheyne-walk, or with old Mr. Anderson in the botanic garden, gathering the virtues of the herbs, and telling each other tales of the cedars and plane trees of foreign parts; may be, looking through the old water gate, or at the statue of Sir Hans Sloane. {6} I hear tell that Miss Lucy has great knowledge of such things; but she’ll not live—not she—no more than her mother; I’m sure of that.” “Who knows?” said James Hardy, “if she had a milder climate, or proper care.” “Ah! the poor sergeant-major! He’s always leading some forlorn hope!” The sergeant-major was one of EIGHTY-THREE THOUSAND MEN who are pensioned by a grateful country; an honourable boon—honourable alike to “those who give, and those who take.” A wound in the head had rendered him, at an early period of life, unfit for future service, and he had taken up his quarters in his native village, only to watch by the dying bed of a beloved wife, who, after a few years of gradual decline, left him the fatal legacy of a child as delicate as herself. Of all the evils that wait on poor humanity, the most sad and the most hopeless, in its progress and its result, is that disease which may be described as peculiar to our climate; acting as a dreadful counterpoise to numerous blessed privileges; the one terrible “set-off” against the plague, the pestilence, the famine, the storm, the earthquake, the wars, which so continually devastate other countries, but from which a merciful Providence has, in a great degree, exempted ours. The raging fever of the blood or the brain, brings the suspense of but a week or two, and busies the mournful watcher; all the ills that “flesh is heir to” have inseparably linked with them some sources of consolation, some motives for hope; they may be borne by the sufferer, and by those who often suffer more intensely than the patient, because of the knowledge that skill and care are mighty to save. But CONSUMPTION—lingering, wasting, “slow but sure”—when the victim has been marked out, the work is, as it were, done! The hectic cheek is as a registered death-doom from which there is no appeal!