With the Connaught Rangers : $b in quarters, camp, and on leaveMaxwell, Edward Herbert
History
With the Connaught Rangers : $b in quarters, camp, and on leave
Maxwell, Edward Herbert
Great Britain. Army. Regiment of Foot, 88th (Connaught Rangers); Soldiers -- Great Britain -- Biography
expert at it after some practice.
My brother officer, Lee Steere, and myself were greatly interested in
the race-meeting before mentioned. Both of us had horses to run, and
we had to train them ourselves; so we discovered an old house near
the race-course--which we called Jockey Lodge--and there we came and
lived occasionally before the races. The house was very old, and the
wooden flooring quite out of repair. I was attacked in it by some
very disagreeable symptoms. I suppose I had walked on the floor in my
bed-room without slippers; for one morning I felt the most maddening
itching in one of my toes, so I shouted for my servant Seeley, who was
a first-rate attendant, and asked him what could be the matter. He
and his wife had both been slaves who had been freed by Colonel Tidy,
I think, of the 14th Regiment. The colonel had given Seeley a watch
with an inscription on it at the time when he made him a free man.
Whenever anything out of the common happened, Seeley would roll his
eyes, and grin from ear to ear, showing his white teeth, and looking
the embodiment of black mischief. Having examined my foot, he almost
shouted with delight.
‘Yah! yah! Massa got jigger toe. Yah! yah!’
I did not appreciate his mirth and laughter.
‘What am I to do, you horrible old rascal?’ I exclaimed.
Seeley bent nearly double, and with his hands on the front of his
thighs, assumed the attitude of long-stop at cricket, and continued to
give expression to his sense of enjoyment. ‘Yah! yah! ho! ho!’ But at
length he became quiet, and proceeded to business. Taking a needle,
he began to scrape away at my toe, nearly driving me mad. Suddenly he
exclaimed, ‘Hi haw!’ like a donkey braying, and then he appeared to
force the needle gently into my foot, and brought out at the end of it
a little bag, which he held up with a triumphant look; for this was the
jigger, which had laid its eggs in my toe, and which, if allowed to
remain, would have been attended with most serious consequences.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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