indispensable, Colonel de Haldimar had never suffered
either officer or man to linger on his pillow after the
first faint dawn had appeared. This was a system to which
Sir Everard could never reconcile himself. He had quitted
England with a view to active service abroad, it is true,
but he had never taken "active service" in its present
literal sense, and, as he frequently declared to his
companions, he preferred giving an Indian warrior a chance
for his scalp any hour after breakfast, to rising at
daybreak, when, from very stupefaction, he seldom knew
whether he stood on his head or his heels. "If the men
must be drilled," he urged, "with a view to their health
and discipline, why not place them under the direction
of the adjutant or the officer of the day, whoever he
might chance to be, and not unnecessarily disturb a body
of gentlemen from their comfortable slumbers at that
unconscionable hour?" Poor Sir Everard! this was the
only grievance of which he complained, and he complained
bitterly. Scarcely a morning passed without his inveighing
loudly against the barbarity of such a custom; threatening
at the same time, amid the laughter of his companions,
to quit the service in disgust at what he called so
ungentlemanly and gothic a habit. All he waited for, he
protested, was to have an opportunity of bearing away
the spoils of some Indian chief, that, on his return to
England, he might afford his lady mother an opportunity
of judging with her own eyes of the sort of enemy he had
relinquished the comforts of home to contend against,
and exhibiting to her very dear friends the barbarous
proofs of the prowess of her son. Though these observations