I had been telling him about Sandy Mackaye. He confessed to an acquaintance with him; but in a reserved and mysterious way, which only heightened my curiosity. We were going through the Horse Guards, and I could not help lingering to look with wistful admiration on the huge mustachoed war-machines who sauntered about the court-yard. A tall and handsome officer, blazing in scarlet and gold, cantered in on a superb horse, and, dismounting, threw the reins to a dragoon as grand and gaudy as himself. Did I envy him? Well--I was but seventeen. And there is something noble to the mind, as well as to the eye, in the great strong man, who can fight--a completeness, a self-restraint, a terrible sleeping power in him. As Mr. Carlyle says, "A soldier, after all, is--one of the few remaining realities of the age. All other professions almost promise one thing, and perform--alas! what? But this man promises to fight, and does it; and, if he be told, will veritably take out a long sword and kill me." So thought my companion, though the mood in which he viewed the fact was somewhat different from my own. "Come on," he said, peevishly clutching me by the arm; "what do you want dawdling? Are you a nursery-maid, that you must stare at those red-coated butchers?" And a deep curse followed. "What harm have they done you?" "I should think I owed them turn enough." "What?" "They cut my father down at Sheffield,--perhaps with the very swords he helped to make,--because he would not sit still and starve, and see us starving around him, while those who fattened on the sweat of his brow, and on those lungs of his, which the sword-grinding dust was eating out day by day, were wantoning on venison and champagne. That's the harm they've done me, my chap!" "Poor fellows!--they only did as they were ordered, I suppose." "And what business have they to let themselves be ordered? What right, I say--what right has any free, reasonable soul on earth, to sell himself for a shilling a day to murder any man, right or wrong--even his own brother or his own father--just because such a whiskered, profligate jackanapes as that officer, without learning, without any god except his own looking-glass and his opera-dancer--a fellow who, just because he is born a gentleman, is set to command grey-headed men before he can command his own meanest passions. Good heavens! that the lives of free men should be entrusted to such a stuffed cockatoo; and that free men should be such traitors to their country, traitors to their own flesh and blood, as to sell themselves, for a shilling a day and the smirks of the nursery-maids, to do that fellow's bidding!" "What are you a-grumbling here about, my man?--gotten the cholera?" asked one of the dragoons, a huge, stupid-looking lad. "About you, you young long-legged cut-throat," answered Crossthwaite, "and all your crew of traitors."