heroes. It is this coxcombry which has
too often caused disdain of the wise chief's maxim of calculation for
winners, namely, to have always the odds on your side, and which has
bled, shattered, and occasionally disgraced us. Young Michell's carrying
powder-bags to the assault, and when ordered to retire, bearing them on
his back, and helping a wounded soldier on the way, did surely well;
nor did Mr. Beauchamp himself behave so badly on an occasion when the
sailors of his battery caught him out of a fire of shell that raised
jets of dust and smoke like a range of geysers over the open, and hugged
him as loving women do at a meeting or a parting. He was penitent before
his uncle, admitting, first, that the men were not in want of an example
of the contempt of death, and secondly, that he doubted whether it was
contempt of death on his part so much as pride--a hatred of being seen
running.

'I don't like the fellow to be drawing it so fine,' said Everard. It
sounded to him a trifle parsonical. But his heart was won by Nevil's
determination to wear out the campaign rather than be invalided or
entrusted with a holiday duty.

'I see with shame (admiration of them) old infantry captains and
colonels of no position beyond their rank in the army, sticking to their
post,' said Nevil, 'and a lord and a lord and a lord slipping off as
though the stuff of the man in him had melted. I shall go through with
it.' Everard approved him. Colonel Halkett wrote that the youth was a
skeleton. Still Everard encouraged him to persevere, and said of him:

'I like him for holding to his work after the strain's over. That tells
the man.'

He observed at his table, in reply to commendations of his nephew:

'Nevil's leak is his political craze, and that seems to be going: I hope
it is. You can't rear a man on politics. When I was of his age I never
looked at the newspapers, except to read the divorce cases. I came to
politics with a ripe judgement. He shines in action, and he'll find that
out, and leave others the palavering.'

It was upon the close of the war that Nevil drove his uncle to avow a
downright undisguised indignation with him. He caught a fever in the
French camp, where he was dispensing vivers and provends out of English
hampers.

'Those French fellows are every man of them trained up to
snapping-point,' said Everard. 'You're sure to have them if you hold out
long against them. And greedy dogs too: they're for half our hamper