Cheer up, good souls! for he you love shall not die yet for many long years. While you are standing there before the porch, dreading the long anxious night, Waterloo has been won, and he--having stood the appointed time in the serried square, watching the angry waves of French cavalry dash in vain against the glittering wall of bayonets--is now leaning against a gun in the French position, alive and well, though fearfully tired, listening to the thunder of the Prussian artillery to the north, and watching the red sun go down across the wild confusion of the battle-field. But home at Clere none slept that night, but met again next morning weary and harassed. All the long three days none of them spoke much, but wandered about the house uneasily. About ten o'clock on the Wednesday night they went to bed, and the old man sleeps from sheer weariness. It was twelve o'clock when there came a clang at the gate, and a sound of horses' feet on the gravel. Agnes was at the window in a moment. "Who goes there?" she cried. "An orderly from Colonel Mountford at Portsmouth," said a voice below. "A letter for Mr. Buckley." She sent a servant to undo the door; and going to the window again, she inquired, trembling,-- "Do you know what the news is, orderly?" "A great victory, my dear," said the man, mistaking her for one of the servants. "Your master is all right. There's a letter from him inside this one." "And I daresay," Mrs. Buckley used to add, when she would tell this old Waterloo story, as we called it, "that the orderly thought me a most heartless domestic, for when I heard what he said, I burst out laughing so loud, that old Mr. Buckley woke up to see what was the matter, and when heard, he laughed as loud as I did." So he came back to them again with fresh laurels, but Agnes never felt safe, till she heard that the powers had determined to chain up her BETE NOIR, Buonaparte, on a lonely rock in the Atlantic, that he might disturb the world no more. Then at last she began to believe that peace might be a reality, and a few months after Waterloo, to their delight and exultation, she bore a noble boy. And as we shall see more of this boy, probably, than of any one else in these following pages, we will if you please appoint him hero, with all the honours and emoluments thereunto pertaining. Perhaps when I have finished, you will think him not so much of a hero after all. But at all events you shall see how he is an honest upright gentleman, and in these times, perhaps such a character is preferable to a hero. Old Marmaduke had been long failing, and two years after this he had taken to his bed, never to leave it again alive. And one day when the son and heir was rolling and crowing on his grandfather's bed, and Agnes was sewing at the window, and James was tying a fly by the bedside, under the old man's directions; he drew the child towards him, and beckoning Agnes from the window spoke thus:--