Every one has heard what miseries the returning transports endured in
the bitter gale of January, 1809. The _Londonderry_, in which my
father sailed, did indeed escape wreck, but at the cost of a week's
beating about the mouth of the Channel. He was, by rights, an
invalid, having taken a wound in the kneecap from a spent bullet, one
of the last fired in the battle; but in the common peril he bore a
hand with the best. For three days and two nights he never shifted
his clothing, which the gale alternately soaked and froze. It was
frozen stiff as a board when the _Londonderry_ made the entrance of
Plymouth Sound; and he was borne ashore in a rheumatic fever.
From this, and from his wound, the doctors restored him at length,
but meanwhile his eyesight had perished.

His misfortunes did not end here. My step-sister Isabel--a beautiful
girl of seventeen, the only child of his first marriage--had met him
at Plymouth, nursed him to convalescence, and brought him home to
Minden Cottage, to the garden which henceforward he tilled, but saw
only through memory. Since then she had married a young officer in
the 52nd Regiment, a Lieutenant Archibald Plinlimmon; but, her
husband having to depart at once for the Peninsula, she had remained
with her father and tended him as before, until death took her--as it
had taken her mother--in childbirth. The babe did not survive her;
and, to complete the sad story, her husband fell a few weeks later
before Badajoz, while assaulting the Picurina Gate with fifty axemen
of the Light Division.

Beneath these blows of fate my father did indeed bow his head, yet
bravely. From the day Isabel died his shoulders took a sensible
stoop; but this was the sole evidence of the mortal wound he carried,