nd makes a motto of our
dandiacal courage, is more perilous to the armies of the nation than that
of a few 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. 'Y