and homely. There was a farmer of the name of Bois, in whose fields we
were quartered, and who was a real good friend to many of us. We built
him a wooden barn among us in our spare time, and many a time I and Jeb
Seaton, my rear-rank man, have hung out his washing, for the smell of
the wet linen seemed to take us both straight home as nothing else could
do. I have often wondered whether that good man and his wife are still
living, though I think it hardly likely, for they were of a hale
middle-age at the time. Jim would come with us too, sometimes, and
would sit with us smoking in the big Flemish kitchen, but he was a
different Jim now to the old one. He had always had a hard touch in
him, but now his trouble seemed to have turned him to flint, and I never
saw a smile upon his face, and seldom heard a word from his lips.
His whole mind was set on revenging himself upon de Lissac for having
taken Edie from him, and he would sit for hours with his chin upon his
hands glaring and frowning, all wrapped in the one idea. This made him
a bit of a butt among the men at first, and they laughed at him for it;
but when they came to know him better they found that he was not a good
man to laugh at, and then they dropped it.

We were early risers at that time, and the whole brigade was usually
under arms at the flush of dawn. One morning--it was the sixteenth of
June--we had just formed up, and General Adams had ridden up to give
some order to Colonel Reynell within a musket-length of where I stood,
when suddenly they both stood staring along the Brussels road. None of
us dared move our heads, but every eye in the regiment whisked round,
and there we saw an officer with the cockade of a general's aide-de-camp
thundering down the road as hard as a great dapple-grey horse could
carry him. He bent his face over its mane and flogged at its neck with
the slack of the bridle, as though he rode for very life.