"You are at the crisis of your fate. Hold your course unchanged a little
longer, and you know what must happen. _I_ know even better than you can
imagine, that, after that has happened, you are lost. No man who could
shed those tears could bear those marks."

"I fully believe it, sir," in a low, shivering voice said Private Richard
Doubledick.

"But a man in any station can do his duty," said the young Captain, "and,
in doing it, can earn his own respect, even if his case should be so very
unfortunate and so very rare that he can earn no other man's. A common
soldier, poor brute though you called him just now, has this advantage in
the stormy times we live in, that he always does his duty before a host
of sympathising witnesses. Do you doubt that he may so do it as to be
extolled through a whole regiment, through a whole army, through a whole
country? Turn while you may yet retrieve the past, and try."

"I will! I ask for only one witness, sir," cried Richard, with a
bursting heart.

"I understand you. I will be a watchful and a faithful one."

I have heard from Private Richard Doubledick's own lips, that he dropped
down upon his knee, kissed that officer's hand, arose, and went out of
the light of the dark, bright eyes, an altered man.

In that year, one thousand seven hundred and ninety-nine, the French were
in Egypt, in Italy, in Germany, where not? Napoleon Bonaparte had
likewise begun to stir against us in India, and most men could read the
signs of the great troubles that were coming on. In the very next year,