well-appointed equipments--your jovial brother officers--hourly
flirtations with the whole female population--never a deficient one in a
garrison town--not to speak of your matches at trotting, coursing, and
pigeon-shooting, and a hundred other delectable modes of getting over
the ground through life, till it please your ungrateful country and the
Horse Guards to make you a major-general--to surrender all these, I say,
for the noise, dust, and damp disagreeables of a country inn, with bacon
to eat, whiskey to drink, and the priest, or the constabulary chief, to
get drunk with--I speak of Ireland here--and your only affair, par
amours, being the occasional ogling of the apothecary's daughter
opposite, as often as she visits the shop, in the soi disant occupation
of measuring out garden seeds and senna. These are indeed, the
exchanges with a difference, for which there is no compensation; and,
for my own part, I never went upon such duty, that I did not exclaim
with the honest Irishman, when the mail went over him, "Oh, Lord! what
is this for?"--firmly believing that in the earthly purgatory of such
duties, I was reaping the heavy retribution attendant on past offences.

Besides, from being rather a crack man in my corps, I thought it somewhat
hard that my turn for such duty should come round about twice as often as
that of my brother officers; but so it is--I never knew a fellow a little
smarter than his neighbours, that was not pounced upon by his colonel for
a victim. Now, however, I looked at these matters in a very different
light. To leave head-quarters was to escape being questioned; while
there was scarcely any post to which I could be sent, where something
strange or adventurous might not turn up, and serve me to erase the
memory of the past, and turn the attention of my companions in any
quarter rather than towards myself.

My orders on the present occasion were to march to Clonmel; from whence I