The Romance of War; or, The Highlanders in Spain, Volume 1 (of 3)Grant, James
General
The Romance of War; or, The Highlanders in Spain, Volume 1 (of 3)
Grant, James
Great Britain. Army. Gordon Highlanders -- Fiction; Peninsular War, 1807-1814 -- Fiction
We will pass over the account of the bone-setting by the Padre
Mendizabal, the famous medical practitioner in Merida, who nearly drove
Ronald mad by an oration on different sorts of fractures, simple and
compound, and the different treatment requisite for the cure of various
gun-shot wounds, before his arm was splinted and bandaged up. Weak and
exhausted from the loss of blood, and his head buzzing with Mendizabal’s
discourse, right glad was Ronald when he found himself in a comfortable
and splendid couch,—Catalina’s own, which she had resigned for his use
as the best in the house,—with its curtains drawn round for the night;
and he forgot, in a dreamy and uneasy slumber, the exciting passages of
the last few days, the danger of his wound, and the sunny eyes of the
donna.
The tolling bells of a neighbouring steeple awakened him early next
morning, and brought his mind back to the world, and a long chain of
disagreeable thoughts.
There is scarcely any thing which makes one feel so much from home, as
the sound of a strange church bell; and the deep and hollow ding-dong
which rung from the gothic steeple of San Juan, was very different from
the merry rattle of the well-known kirk bell at Lochisla. Ronald
thought of that village bell, and the noble peasantry whom it was wont
to call to prayer, and the association brought a gush of fond, and sad
recollections into his mind. He felt himself, as it were, deserted in a
strange country,—among a people of whose language he knew almost
nothing; he looked round him, and his apartment appeared strange and
foreign,—every object it presented was new and peculiar to his eye. He
thought of Scotland—of HOME,—home with all its ten thousand dear and
deeply impressed associations, until he wept like a child, and his mind
became a prey to most profound and intense dejection,—suffering from the
home-sickness, an acuteness and agony of feeling, which only those can
know who have been so unhappy as to experience this amiable feeling; one
which exists all-powerfully in the hearts of the Scots, who, although
great travellers and wanderers from home, ever turn their thoughts,
fondly and sadly, to the lofty mountains, the green forests, and the
rushing rivers which they first beheld when young, and to the grassy sod
that covers the dust of their warrior ancestors, and which they wish to
cover their own, when they follow them "to the land of the leal."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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