d of acquiring that expansion and sponginess to which old
people are prone in this country, from the long course of internal
and external soakage they experience, he had grown dry and stiff in
the process of years. The skin of his face had so shrunk away that
he could not close eyes or mouth--the latter, therefore, stood on a
perpetual ghastly grin, and the former on an incessant stare. He
had but one serviceable joint in his body, which was at the bottom
of the backbone, and that creaked and grated whenever he bent. He
could not raise his feet from the ground, but skated along the
drawing-room carpet whenever he wished to ring the bell. The only
sign of moisture in his whole body was a pellucid drop that I
occasionally noticed on the end of a long, dry nose. He used
generally to shuffle about in company with a little fellow that was
fat on one side and lean on the other. That is to say, he was
warped on one side as if he had been scorched before the fire; he
had a wry neck, which made his head lean on one shoulder; his hair
was smugly powdered, and he had a round, smirking, smiling, apple
face, with a bloom on it like that of a frost-bitten leaf in
autumn. We had an old, fat general by the name of Trotter, who had,
I suspect, been promoted to his high rank to get him out of the way
of more able and active officers, being an instance that a man may
occasionally rise in the world through absolute lack of merit. I
could not help watching the movements of this redoubtable old Hero,
who, I'll warrant, has been the champion and safeguard of half the
garrison towns in England, and fancying to myself how Bonaparte
would have delighted in having such toast-and-butter generals to
deal with. This old cad is doubtless a sample of those generals
that flourished in the old military school, when armies would
manoeuvre and watch each other for months; now and then have a
desperate skirmish, and, after marching and countermarching about
the 'Low Countries' through a glorious campaign, retire on the
first pinch of cold weather into snug winter quarters in some fat
Flemish town, and eat and drink and fiddle through the winter.
Boney must have sadly disconcerted the comfortable system of these
old warriors by the harrowing, restless, cut-and-slash mode of
warfare that