The battle of Waterloo ended the war; Bonaparte was despatched to St. Helena, and all prospects of promotion are over. My noble patron has accomplished the number of his days, and no “red flag at the fore” will ever fall to my lot, unless indeed I include a certain Bardolphian tinge to the most prominent feature of my face, which has been _red at the fore_ for some years past; but excepting the half-pay of a lieutenant, a small remnant of prize-money, and a wife and seven children, I am as poor as a churchwarden’s charity-box. THE PRISONER. “It is thou liberty! thrice sweet and gracious goddess, whom all in public and in private worship, whose taste is grateful and ever will be so, till Nature herself shall change.” STERNE. Twenty years had floated down the stream of time since my escape from a French prison, and my almost immediate embarkation for the East Indies with cheerful prospects and with a glowing heart. Hope and enterprise urged me on in my career, and the efforts of my industry were crowned with complete success. But ah! how dear the purchase; an Asiatic clime had undermined my constitution, and ill health had rendered me peevish and discontented; so that I determined once more to visit the land of my nativity, and I embarked in an Indiaman for that purpose. Only those who have been long estranged from the home of their fathers, and are returning to it with ardent expectation and thrilling apprehensions--only those can tell the mingling sensations of pain and pleasure that agitate the breast, as the tall ship urges on her course--“splash, splash, along the wave,”--while the anxious mariner, day after day, calculates his distance from the shore and sighs to find it yet so far away. At last, I trod on British ground, but how changed were all things since my departure! The authors of my being were no more; the companions of my youth were scattered upon the wide world, or numbered with the dead; while others whom I had folded in my arms at parting, and felt my cheek bedewed with their tears, now received me with distant politeness and cold reserve. No cheering heart-descriptive smile of affection welcomed my return, and I found myself alone, unfriended and unblest. Society became my aversion, and withdrawing from the world to the cottage where I first received existence, my days were passed in nurturing the melancholy that consumed my heart, and my chief gratification was to pass the hours of solitude near the tomb of my parents. There I would pour out my griefs, and pray to join them in the blissful realms of immortality; but a life like this, working upon a debilitated constitution, soon shattered my intellects, and my reason became impaired.