Then, though, in 1857, when a newspaper cost threepence or thereabouts,
and schools were so far from being free that only the sons of gentlemen
(and seldom the daughters of even gentlemen, remember) attended them,
the art of reading was not so common as it now is. Writing was still
more uncommon. And it has not been pretended that Brown was other
than a commoner. He was a stiff-backed man, and honest. And the
pride that had raised him to the rank of sergeant was even stiffer
than his stock. But he came from the ranks that owned no vote, nor
little else, in those days, and he owned a sweetheart of the same
rank as himself, who could neither read nor write. And when people
whose somewhat primitive ideas on right and wrong lead them to look
on daguerreotypes as works of the devil happen too to be living more
than five thousand miles apart, when one of the two can not write,
nor readily afford the cost of postage, and when the other is nearly
always on the move from post to post, it is not exactly to be wondered
at that memory of each other was all they had to dwell upon.

A journey to India in '57 meant, to the rank and file, oblivion and
worse. There were men then, of course, just as there are now, who
would leave a girl behind them tied fast by a promise of futile and
endless devotion; men who knew what the girls did not know--that
India was all but inaccessible to any one outside of government employ,
and that a common soldier's chance of sending for his girl, or of
coming home again to claim her, was something in the neighborhood
of one in thirty thousand.

But there were other men, like William Brown, who were a shade too
honest and too stiff-chinned to buckle under to the social conditions
of England in those days, and who were consequently not exactly pestered
with offers of employment. And a man who could see the difference