is life, into any ear except his reclaimer's. That
previous scene in his existence was closed. He had firmly resolved that
his expiation should be to live unknown; to disturb no more the peace
that had long grown over his old offences; to let it be revealed, when he
was dead, that he had striven and suffered, and had never forgotten; and
then, if they could forgive him and believe him--well, it would be time
enough--time enough!

But that night, remembering the words he had cherished for two years,
"Tell her how we became friends. It will comfort her, as it comforts
me," he related everything. It gradually seemed to him as if in his
maturity he had recovered a mother; it gradually seemed to her as if in
her bereavement she had found a son. During his stay in England, the
quiet garden into which he had slowly and painfully crept, a stranger,
became the boundary of his home; when he was able to rejoin his regiment
in the spring, he left the garden, thinking was this indeed the first
time he had ever turned his face towards the old colours with a woman's
blessing!

He followed them--so ragged, so scarred and pierced now, that they would
scarcely hold together--to Quatre Bras and Ligny. He stood beside them,
in an awful stillness of many men, shadowy through the mist and drizzle
of a wet June forenoon, on the field of Waterloo. And down to that hour
the picture in his mind of the French officer had never been compared
with the reality.

The famous regiment was in action early in the battle, and received its
first check in many an eventful year, when he was seen to fall. But it
swept on to avenge him, and left behind it no such creature in the world
of consciousness as Lieutenant Richard Doubledick.

Through pits of mire, and pools of rain; along deep ditches, once roads,
that were pounded and ploughed to pieces by artillery, heavy waggons,
tramp of men and horses, and the struggle of every wheeled thing that
could carry wounded soldiers; jolted among the dying and the dead, so
disfigured by blood and mud as to be hardly recognisable for humanity;
undisturbed by the moaning of men and the shrieking of horses, which,
newly taken from the peaceful pursuits of life, could not endure the
sight of the stragglers lying by the wayside, never to resume their
toilsome journey; dead, as to any sentient life that was in it, and yet
alive,--the form that had been Lieutenant Richard Doubledick, with whose
praises England rang