harder, read more, been a handsomer man than any officer now
serving Her Majesty.

When I first went to India in 1802, I was a raw cornet of
seventeen, with blazing red hair, six feet four in height, athletic
at all kinds of exercises, owing money to my tailor and everybody
else who would trust me, possessing an Irish brogue, and my full
pay of 120l. a year. I need not say that with all these advantages
I did that which a number of clever fellows have done before me--I
fell in love, and proposed to marry immediately.

But how to overcome the difficulty?--It is true that I loved Julia
Jowler--loved her to madness; but her father intended her for a
Member of Council at least, and not for a beggarly Irish ensign.
It was, however, my fate to make the passage to India (on board of
the "Samuel Snob" East Indiaman, Captain Duffy) with this lovely
creature, and my misfortune instantaneously to fall in love with
her. We were not out of the Channel before I adored her,
worshipped the deck which she trod upon, kissed a thousand times
the cuddy-chair on which she used to sit. The same madness fell on
every man in the ship. The two mates fought about her at the Cape;
the surgeon, a sober pious Scotchman, from disappointed affection,
took so dreadfully to drinking as to threaten spontaneous
combustion; and old Colonel Lilywhite, carrying his wife and seven
daughters to Bengal, swore that he would have a divorce from Mrs.
L., and made an attempt at suicide; the captain himself told me,
with tears in his eyes, that he hated his hitherto-adored Mrs.
Duffy, although he had had nineteen children by her.

We used to call her the witch--there was magic in her beauty and in