"Tush," said the major, "I was once nearer being hanged than you, doctor; for I was tried, and sentenced, and, moreover, only escaped one noose to be caught by another--for I got my wife by it." Our major was a jolly and cozy old fellow, who was addicted to a little flirtation with married dames of mature age, and to making downright love to widows (if his good lady was absent), and invariably opened the trenches by affecting to consider them the sisters of their handsome daughters. He was a great favorite with us all; but, being married, he never dined at mess, unless when specially invited by some one. Thus we warmly welcomed our old major's story, which he began without further preamble. CHAPTER XXIV. "ESTELLA." "I entered the service," quoth the Major, "when the Peninsular War was at its height, and my commission was signed by the first gentleman in Europe, then Prince Regent; truly we had queer ideas of what constituted a gentleman in those days, "'In my hot youth, when George III. was king.' "I joined our first battalion in Spain, and had more than enough of marching, fighting, and starving in the desolate province of Estremadura, where Marshal Macdonald and General Foy never gave us a moment to spare. I was wounded at La Nava, and at the storming of Almarez. When I scrambled over the palisades, with my sword-arm in a sling, I remember a voltigeur officer rushing upon me with his sabre uplifted; but, on perceiving my wound, he lowered his weapon gracefully in salute, and passed on to encounter another. We took the garrison prisoners, blew up the works, and threw the guns into the Tagus. At night, when we buried the dead, by flinging them into their own trenches, I was shocked to perceive my generous and gallant voltigeur among them--cold and stiff--slain by a shot in his heart, and with his right hand still grasping the hilt of the same sabre with which he had threatened and so chivalrously spared me. I was at the defence of Alba, and with the covering army at Badajoz, and I fought at Victoria, where our colonel, the gallant Cadogan, was killed, and where we put up a statue to his memory; but so unlike him, that I am sure if the good man ever looks at it out of Heaven, he will never recognise himself. "We had always hard fighting, for I belonged to the light troops; and so far as the head was concerned in those days, I was very well adapted for that branch of the service.