of Lucy with all its train of doubts and
fears, passed in review before me, and I took no note of time till far past
noon. I now looked to the back part of the coach, where Mike's voice had
been, as usual, in the ascendant for some time, and perceived that he was
surrounded by an eager auditory of four raw recruits, who, under the care
of a sergeant, were proceeding to Cork to be enrolled in their regiment.
The sergeant, whose minutes of wakefulness were only those when the coach
stopped to change horses, and when he got down to mix a "summat hot," paid
little attention to his followers, leaving them perfectly free in all their
movements, to listen to Mike's eloquence and profit by his suggestions,
should they deem fit. Master Michael's services to his new acquaintances,
I began to perceive, were not exactly of the same nature as Dibdin is
reported to have rendered to our navy in the late war. Far from it. His
theme was no contemptuous disdain for danger; no patriotic enthusiasm
to fight for home and country; no proud consciousness of British valor,
mingled with the appropriate hatred of our mutual enemies,--on the
contrary, Mike's eloquence was enlisted for the defendant. He detailed,
and in no unimpressive way either, the hardships of a soldier's life,--its
dangers, its vicissitudes, its chances, its possible penalties, its
inevitably small rewards; and, in fact, so completely did he work on the
feelings of his hearers that I perceived more than one glance exchanged
between the victims that certainly betokened anything save the resolve to
fight for King George. It was at the close of a long and most powerful
appeal upon the superiority of any other line in life, petty larceny and
small felony inclusive, that he concluded with the following quotation:--

"Thrue for ye, boys!

'With your red scarlet coat,
You're as proud as a goat,
And your long cap and feather.'

But, by the piper that played before Moses! it's more whipping nor
gingerbread is going on among them, av ye knew but all, and heerd the
misfortune that happened to my father."

"And was he a sodger?" inquired one.

"Troth was he, more sorrow to him; and wasn't he a'most whipped one day for
doing what he was bid?"

"Musha, but that was hard!"

"To be sure it was hard; but faix, when my father seen that they didn't
know their own minds, he thought, anyhow, he knew his, so he ran away,--and
devil a bit of him they ever cotch afther. May be