THE CONFESSIONS OF HARRY LORREQUER, Vol. 3

[By Charles James Lever (1806-1872)]

Dublin

MDCCCXXXIX.

Volume 3. (Chapter XVIII-XXIII)

Contents:

CHAPTER XVIII
Detachment Duty--An Assize Town

CHAPTER XIX
The Assize Town

CHAPTER XX
A Day in Dublin

CHAPTER XXI
A Night at Howth

CHAPTER XXII
The Journey

CHAPTER XXIII
Calais

CHAPTER XVIII.

DETACHMENT DUTY--AN ASSIZE TOWN.

As there appeared to be but little prospect of poor Fitzgerald ever
requiring any explanation from me as to the events of that morning, for
he feared to venture from his room, lest he might be recognised and
prosecuted for abduction, I thought it better to keep my own secret also;
and it was therefore with a feeling of any thing but regret, that I
received an order which, under other circumstances, would have rendered
me miserable--to march on detachment duty. To any one at all conversant
with the life we lead in the army, I need not say how unpleasant such a
change usually is. To surrender your capital mess, with all its
well-appointed equipments--your jovial brother officers--hourly
flirtations with the whole female population--never a deficient one in a
garrison town--not to speak of your matches at trotting, coursing, and
pigeon-shooting, and a hundred other delectable modes of getting over
the ground through life, till it please your ungrateful country and the
Horse Guards to make you a major-general--to surrender all these, I say,
for the noise, dust, and damp disagreeables of a country inn, with bacon
to eat, whiskey to drink, and the priest, or the constabulary chief, to
get drunk with--I speak of Ireland here--and your only affair, par
amours, being the occasional ogling of the apothecary's daughter
opposite, as often as she visits the shop, in the soi disant occupation
of measuring out garden seeds and senna. These are indeed, the
exchanges with a difference, for which there is no compensation; and,
for my own part, I never went upon such duty, that I did not exclaim
with the honest Irishman, when the mail went over him, "Oh, Lord! what
is this for?"--firmly believing that in the earthly purgatory of such
duties, I was reaping the heavy retribution attendant on past offences.

Besides, from being rather a crack man in my corps, I thought it somewhat
hard that my turn for such duty should come round about twice as often as
that of my brother officers; but so it is--I never knew a fellow a lit