hine own
pillow!"

Whilst Butler, who had now returned beneath the cliff of the Fawn's
Tower, was absorbed in this silent musing, his comrade was no less
occupied with his own cares. The sergeant had acquired much of that
forecast, in regard to small comforts, which becomes, in some degree, an
instinct in those whose profession exposes them to the assaults of wind
and weather. Tobacco, in his reckoning, was one of the most
indispensable muniments of war; and he was, accordingly, seldom without
a good stock of this commodity. A corn cob, at any time, furnished him
the means of carving the bowl of a pipe; whilst, in his pocket, he
carried a slender tube of reed which, being united to the bowl, formed a
smoking apparatus, still familiar to the people of this country, and
which, to use the sergeant's own phrase, "couldn't be touched for
sweetness by the best pipe the very Queen of the Dutch herself ever
smoked; and that"--he was in the habit of adding--"must be, as I take
it, about the tenderest thing for a whiff that the Dutchman knowed how
to make."

A flint and steel--part also of his gear--now served to ignite his
tobacco, and he had been, for some time past, sedately scanning the
length and breadth of his own fancies, which were, doubtless rendered
the more sublime by the mistiness which a rich volume of smoke had shed
across his vision and infused into the atmosphere around his brain.

"Twelve shillings and nine pence," were the first words which became
audible to Butler in the depth of his revery. "That, major," said the
sergeant, who had been rummaging his pocket, and counting over a handful
of coin, "is exactly the amount I have spent since this time last night.
I paid it to the old lady of the Swan at Charlottesville, taking a
sixpence for mending your bridle rein. Since you must make me paymaster
for our march, I am obliged to square accounts every night. My noddle
wont hold two days reckoning. It gets scrimped and flustered with so
many numberings, that I lose the count clean out."

"It is of little consequence, Galbraith," replied Butler, seeking to
avoid his companion's interruption.

"Squaring up, and smoothing off, and bringing out this and that shilling
straight to a penny, don't come natural to me," continued Robinson, too
intent upon his reckoning to observe the disinclination of Butler to a
parley, "money matters are not in my line. I take to them as
disunderstandingly as Gill Bentley did to the co