I am not going to give here an account of my military services;
they will appear in my great national autobiography, in forty
volumes, which I am now preparing for the press. I was with my
regiment in all Wellesley's brilliant campaigns; then taking dawk,
I travelled across the country north-eastward, and had the honour
of fighting by the side of Lord Lake at Laswaree, Degg,
Furruckabad, Futtyghur, and Bhurtpore: but I will not boast of my
actions--the military man knows them, MY SOVEREIGN appreciates
them. If asked who was the bravest man of the Indian army, there
is not an officer belonging to it who would not cry at once,
GAHAGAN. The fact is, I was desperate: I cared not for life,
deprived of Julia Jowler.

With Julia's stony looks ever before my eyes, her father's stern
refusal in my ears, I did not care, at the close of the campaign,
again to seek her company or to press my suit. We were eighteen
months on service, marching and counter-marching, and fighting
almost every other day: to the world I did not seem altered; but
the world only saw the face, and not the seared and blighted heart
within me. My valour, always desperate, now reached to a pitch of
cruelty; I tortured my grooms and grass-cutters for the most
trifling offence or error,--I never in action spared a man,--I
sheared off three hundred and nine heads in the course of that
single campaign.

Some influence, equally melancholy, seemed to have fallen upon poor
old Jowler. About six months after we had left Dum Dum, he
received a parcel of letters from Benares (whither his wife had
retired with her daughter), and so deeply did they seem to weigh