so had to march to
Waterford Harbour, whither after joining our other companions at
Tralee we proceeded, and embarking on board a transport, arrived at
Plymouth about June in the year 1821. Thus finally ended my military
career, which had lasted seventeen years and seven months, the greater
part of the time having been spent on active service. I was discharged
on the same pension as before of ninepence a day, that having been
stopped during my stay in the Third Veteran Battalion.
From Plymouth I and my wife marched back to Studland, where we took a
house, and my master immediately took me back to work. I drifted
about, however, between one or two trades, and finally took a little
public-house, where I and my wife lived pretty prosperously till she
died. I began to feel rather unwell, too, and thought it best to give
up working and the public-house: so I wrote to the authorities at
Chelsea, and obtained through the influence of a kind gentleman an
addition of threepence a day to my pension, making a shilling in all;
and with that I am now living in a house that was bequeathed to me for
as long as I live by my late master, as comfortably as these
circumstances and the interposition of a few friends can make me.
And to conclude I may add that I have striven here as well as my
faculties will allow, though I know that is imperfectly, to sum up as
it were in a small compass, so that they can be read over in a few
hours by the residing populace, the leading scenes of my life, coupled
as they have been with the various campaigns I served in; and though
I am sorry that I cannot give the reader fuller details of the
Peninsula and Waterloo, yet I think that if any even of my comrades
themselves who went through the same campaigns, were to take up my
work to examine it, they could not say that such information as I have
been able to give has been wrong.
THE END.
LONDON:
PRINTED BY GILBERT AND RIVINGTON, LIMITED,
52, ST. JOHN'S SQUARE.
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Lawrence, by William Lawrence
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