+GORDON SELLAR+




CHAPTER I.


While my mother was a servant in Glasgow she married a soldier. I have
only a faint remembrance of my father, of a tall man in a red coat
coming to see us in the afternoons and tossing me up and down to the
ceiling. I was in my fourth year when his regiment was hurried to
Belgium to fight Bonaparte. One day there rose a shouting in the
streets, it was news of a great victory, the battle of Waterloo. At
night mother took me to Argyle street to see the illuminations, and I
never forgot the blaze of lights and the great crowd, cheering. At the
Cross there were men with bottles, drinking the health of Wellington.
When my mother caught me up to get past the drunken men she was
shivering. Long afterwards, when I was able to put two and two together
I understood it was her fear of what had happened father. She went often
to the barracks to ask if any word had come, but except that the
regiment was in the thick of the fight they could tell nothing. It might
be three weeks after the battle that a sergeant came to our room. Mother
was out working He left a paper on the table and went away. When mother
came home late, she snatched the paper up, gave a cry that I hear yet,
and taking me in her arms fell on the bed and sobbed as if her heart
would break. I must have asked her what had happened, for I recall her
squeezing me tighter to her bosom and saying My fatherless boy. Long
after, I met a comrade of my father, who told me he acted bravely all
day and was cut down by a dragoon when the French charged on the