men to our two, and two guns to our one, and, by God! they'll make you
recruities wish you were back in Argyle Street before they have finished
with you."

He was not a cheering man, our sergeant; but then he had been in every
fight since Corunna, and had a medal with seven clasps upon his breast,
so that he had a right to talk in his own fashion.

When the Frenchmen had all arranged themselves just out of cannon-shot
we saw a small group of horsemen, all in a blaze with silver and scarlet
and gold, ride swiftly between the divisions, and as they went a roar of
cheering burst out from either side of them, and we could see arms
outstretched to them and hands waving. An instant later the noise had
died away, and the two armies stood facing each other in absolute deadly
silence--a sight which often comes back to me in my dreams. Then, of a
sudden, there was a lurch among the men just in front of us; a thin
column wheeled off from the dense blue clump, and came swinging up
towards the farm-house which lay below us. It had not taken fifty paces
before a gun banged out from an English battery on our left, and the
battle of Waterloo had begun.

It is not for me to try to tell you the story of that battle, and,
indeed, I should have kept far enough away from such a thing had it not
happened that our own fates, those of the three simple folk who came
from the border country, were all just as much mixed up in it as those
of any king or emperor of them all. To tell the honest truth, I have
learned more about that battle from what I have read than from what I
saw, for how much could I see with a comrade on either side, and a great
white cloud-bank at the very end of my firelock? It was from books and
the talk of others that I learned how the heavy cavalry charged, how