"By my sowl," O'Grady said to him, afterwards, "Terence O'Connor, you take me breath away altogether. To think that a year ago you were just a gossoon, and here ye are a colonel--a Portuguese colonel, I grant, but still a colonel--fighting Soult, and houlding defiles, and making night attacks, and thrashing the French cavalry, and carrying off a nun from a convent, and outwitting a bishop, and playing all sorts of divarsions. It bates me entirely. There is Dicky Ryan, who, as I tould him yesterday, had just the same chances as you have had, just Dicky Ryan still. I tould him he ought to blush down to his boots." "And what did he say, O'Grady?" "The young spalpeen had the impudence to say that there was I, Captain O'Grady, just the same as when he first joined, and, barring the loss of an arm, divil a bit the better. And the worst of it is, it was true entirely. If I could but find a pretty cousin shut up in a convent you would see that I would not be backward in doing what had to be done; but no such luck comes to me at all, at all." "Quite so, O' Grady; I have had tremendous luck. And it has all come about owing to my happening to think it would be a good thing to take possession of that French lugger." "Don't you think it, me boy," O'Grady said, seriously. "No doubt a man may have a turn of luck, though it is not everyone who takes advantage of it when it comes. But when you see a man always succeeding, always doing something that other fellows don't do, and making his way up step by step, you may put it down that luck has very little to do with the matter, and that he has got something in him that other men haven't got. You may have had some luck to start with--enough, perhaps, to have got you your lieutenancy, though I don't say that it was luck; but you cannot put the rest of it down to that." At this moment Dick Ryan came and joined them. "Well, Dicky," Terence said, "have you had no fun lately in the regiment?" "Not a scrap," Ryan said, dismally. "There was not much chance of fun on that long march; on board ship there was a storm all the way; then we were kept on board the transport at Cork nearly three months. Everyone was out of temper, and a mouse would not have dared squeak on board the ship. I have had a bad time of it since the day we lost you." "Oh, well, you will have plenty of chances yet, Dicky." "It has not been the same thing since you have gone, Terence," he grumbled. "Of course we could not always be having fun; but you know that we were always putting our heads together and talking over what might be done. It was good fun, even if we could not carry it out. I tried to stir up the others of our lot, but they don't seem to have it in them. I wish you could get me transferred to your regiment. I know that we should have plenty of fun there."