Adventure stories; England -- Fiction; Romanies -- Fiction
France, who was his cousin, was sending an army to help him, under the
command of his own son, whom the English called Prince Hilt, because when
he was told that he was appointed to the command, he clapped his hand on
the hilt of his sword. So I enlisted into the regiment of the Faith,
which was made up of Spaniards, many of them priests who had run out of
Spain, and broken Germans, and foot-foundered Irish, like myself. It was
said to be a blackguard regiment, that same regiment of the Faith; but,
'faith, I saw nothing blackguardly going on in it, for you would hardly
reckon card-playing and dominoes, and pitch and toss blackguardly, and I
saw nothing else in it. There was one thing in it which I disliked--the
priests drawing their Spanish knives occasionally, when they lost their
money. After we had been some time at Pau, the army of the Faith was
sent across the mountains into Spain, as the vanguard of the French; and
no sooner did the Spaniards see the Faith than they made a dash at it,
and the Faith ran away, myself along with it, and got behind the French
army, which told it to keep there, and the Faith did so, and followed the
French army, which soon scattered the Spaniards, and in the end placed
the king on his throne again. When the war was over the Faith was
disbanded; some of the foreigners, however, amongst whom I was one, were
put into a Guard regiment, and there I continued for more than a year.
"One day, being at a place called the Escurial, I took stock, as the
tradesmen say, and found I possessed the sum of eighty dollars won by
playing at cards, for though I could not play so well with the foreign
cards as with the pack you gave me, Shorsha, I had yet contrived to win
money from the priests and soldiers of the Faith. Finding myself
possessed of such a capital, I determined to leave the service, and to
make the best of my way to Ireland; so I deserted, but coming in an evil
hour to a place they calls Torre Lodones, I found the priest playing at
cards with his parishioners. The sight of the cards made me stop, and
then, fool like, notwithstanding the treasure I had about me, I must wish
to play, so not being able to speak their language, I made signs to them
to let me play, and the priest and his thaives consented willingly; so I
sat down to cards with the priest and two of his parishioners, and in a
little time had won plenty of their money, but I had better never have
done any such thing, for suddenly the priest and all his parishioners set
upon me and bate me, and took from me all I had, and cast me out of the
village more dead than alive. Och! it's a bad village that, and if I had
known what it was I would have avoided it, or run straight through it,
though I saw all the card-playing in the world going on in it. There is
a proverb about it, as I was afterwards told, old as the time of the
Moors, which holds good to the present day--it is, that in Torre Lodones
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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