There is, perhaps, no species of society so striking and so captivating to the young man entering on life as that of a military mess. The easy, well-bred intimacy, that never degenerates into undue familiarity; the good-humored, playful raillery, that never verges on coarseness or severity; the happy blending of old men's wisdom and young men's buoyancy,--are all very attractive features of social intercourse, even independently of the stronger interest that invests the companionship of men whose career is arms. I felt this, and enjoyed it too; not the less pleasantly that I discovered no evidence of that violent partisan feeling I had been led to believe was the distinguishing mark of the Royalist soldier. If by chance any allusion was made to the troubles of the period, it was invariably done rather in a tone of respect for mistaken and ill directed political views, than in reprehension of disloyalty and rebellion; and when I heard the dispassionate opinions and listened to the mild counsels of these men, whom I had always believed to be the veriest tyrants and oppressors, I could scarcely credit my own senses, so utterly opposed were my impressions and my experience. One only of the party evinced an opposite feeling. He was a pale, thin, rather handsome man, of about five and twenty, who had lately joined them from a dragoon regiment, and who by sundry little innuendoes, was ever bringing uppermost the preference he evinced for his former service, and his ardent desire to be back again in the cavalry. Captain Montague Crofts was indeed the only exception I witnessed to the almost brotherly feeling that prevailed in the Forty-fifth. Instead of identifying himself with the habits and opinions of his brother officers, he held himself studiously apart. Regarding his stay in the regiment like a period of probation, he seemed resolved to form neither intimacies nor friendships, but to wait patiently for the time of his leaving the corps to emancipate himself from a society below his caste.