to my taste, and brought me, besides, sufficiently often on the stage to
enable me to follow all the fortunes of the piece. Brussels, where I was
then living, was adorned at the period by a most agreeable English society.
Some leaders of the fashionable world of London had come there to refit and
recruit, both in body and estate. There were several pleasant and a great
number of pretty people among them; and so far as I could judge, the
fashionable dramas of Belgrave Square and its vicinity were being performed
in the Rue Royale and the Boulevard de Waterloo with very considerable
success. There were dinners, balls, déjeûners, and picnics in the Bois de
Cambre, excursions to Waterloo, and select little parties to Bois-fort,--a
charming little resort in the forest whose intense cockneyism became
perfectly inoffensive as being in a foreign land, and remote from the
invasion of home-bred vulgarity. I mention all these things to show the
adjuncts by which I was aided, and the rattle of gayety by which I was, as
it were, "accompanied," when I next tried my voice.

The soldier element tinctured strongly our society, and I will say most
agreeably. Among those whom I remember best were several old Peninsulars.
Lord Combermere was of this number, and another of our set was an officer
who accompanied, if indeed he did not command, the first boat party who
crossed the Douro. It is needless to say how I cultivated a society so
full of all the storied details I was eager to obtain, and how generously
disposed were they to give me all the information I needed. On topography
especially were they valuable to me, and with such good result that I have
been more than once complimented on the accuracy of my descriptions of
places which I have never seen and whose features I have derived entirely
from the narratives of my friends.

When, therefore, my publishers asked me could I write a story in the
Lorrequer vein, in which active service and military adventure could figure