you may dance like Vestris, draw like
Grant, ride like Alexander; and yet, with all these accomplishments, it
is a hundred chances to one that your black coat, although fashioned by
the shears and polished by the goose of Stultz, will be extinguished by
the gaudy scarlet habiliments of a raw-boned ensign, emancipated six
months ago, for the first time in his life, from the wilderness of a
Highland glen, and even now as awkward a cub as ever presumed to plunge
into the perils of a polka.

Let no man, nor woman either, consider these observations flummery or
verbiage. They are my calm deliberate opinions, written, it is true,
under circumstances of considerable irritation, but nevertheless
deliberate. I have no love to the army, for I have been sacrificed for a
dragoon. My affections have been slighted, my person vilified, my
professional prospects damaged, and my constitution fearfully shaken in
consequence of this military mania. I have made an idiot of myself in
the eyes of my friends and relatives. I have absolutely gone upon the
turf. I have lost some valuable inches of epidermis, and every bone of
my body feels at the present moment as sore as though I were the sole
survivor of a terrific railway collision. A more injured individual than
myself never mounted upon a three-legged stool, and from that high
altitude I now hurl down defiance and anathemas upon the regulars, be
they horse or foot, sappers or miners, artillery, pioneers, or marines!

It was my accursed fate to love, and love in vain. I do not know whether
it was the eye or the instep, the form or the voice, of Edith Bogle,
which first drew my attention, and finally fascinated my regards, as I
beheld her swimming swan-like down the Assembly Rooms at the last
Waverley Ball. A more beautiful representative of Die Vernon could not
have been found within the boundary of the three kingdoms. Her rich
auburn hair flowed out from beneath the crimson network which strove in
vain to confine within its folds that bright luxuriant sea--on her brow
there lay one pearl, pure as an angel's tear--and oh! sweet even to
bewilderment was the smile that she cast around her, as, resting upon
the arm of the moody Master of Ravenswood, she floated away--a thing of
light--in the mazy current of the waltz! I shall not dwell now upon the
circumstances of the subsequent introduction; on the delicious hour of
converse at the supper-table; or on the whispered, and--as I flattered
myse