We have said that Gustavus M’Iver had been in the Peninsula; and we may be believed or not, just as suits the reader’s credulity with our credibility; but he was a luckless wight who dared to doubt that fact in the personal presence of the hero himself; better by far he had been at St Sebastian, for the never a one we ever heard of, that had the temerity to express any scepticism on the point that did not live to repent it. There can be no doubt, however, on the subject; for Gustavus was not only in the Peninsula, but he fought there very well; and no great thanks to him either, for he had the entire charge of the mess—a post of honour he had acquired from an indisputable superiority in culinary lore, and a most indefatigable perseverance as well as an unexampled adroitness in the art of carving both for himself and others. The praise he got for fighting was, in so far as regarded the immense heaps of hungry Frenchmen he hewed down with his falchion, true enough; the bulletin writer recorded the fact just as it was reported to him, that the great Goliath Gustavus did actually perform very wonderful feats of sheer killing; and we cannot help thinking, notwithstanding of the sneers of his brother officers, that it would not have become the dignity of a despatch to have made any allusion whatever to the manner in which he had kept up his body and his courage. When the war was done, he came home filled with glory; and as, when the world speaks of a man, it is unnecessary for him to speak of himself, he seldom (for he was a sensible man) ever thought of speaking either of himself or any other person or thing. Conceit is the foundation of speech; where a man is filled to the very throat with glory, there is little occasion for him ever opening his mouth; and therefore it was that Gustavus, in addition to his other peculiarities, seldom deigned to hold converse with the creatures of the earth, unless it were in his capacity of paymaster of pensions (an office his prowess had secured to him), when he was compelled to speak, to make others hold their tongues—an operation in which he succeeded to a miracle, from the accumulated load of authority he derived from his silence. CHAPTER II. GUSTAVUS FALLS IN LOVE.