for they would put the ball into a greasy rag and then hammer it down with a mallet, but they could fire both further and straighter than we.  All that part of Belgium was covered with British troops at that time; for the Guards were over near Enghien, and there were cavalry regiments on the further side of us.  You see, it was very necessary that Wellington should spread out all his force, for Boney was behind the screen of his fortresses, and of course we had no means of saying on what side he might pop out, except that he was pretty sure to come the way that we least expected him.  On the one side he might get between us and the sea, and so cut us off from England; and on the other he might shove in between the Prussians and ourselves.  But the Duke was as clever as he, for he had his horse and his light troops all round him, like a great spider’s web, so that the moment a French foot stepped across the border he could close up all his men at the right place.

For myself, I was very happy at Ath, and I found the folk very kindly and homely.  There was a farmer of the name of Bois, in whose fields we were quartered, and who was a real good friend to many of us.  We built him a wooden barn among us in our spare time, and many a time I and Jeb Seaton, my rear-rank man, have hung out his washing, for the smell of the wet linen seemed to take us both straight home as nothing else could do.  I have often wondered whether that good man and his wife are still living, though I think it hardly likely, for they were of a hale middle-age at the time.  Jim would come with us too, sometimes, and would sit with us smoking in the big Flemish kitchen, but he was a different Jim now to the old one.  He had always had a hard touch in him, but now his trouble seemed to have turned him to flint, and I never saw a smile upon his face, and seldom heard a word from his lips.  His whole mind was set on revenging himself upon de Lissac for having taken Edie from him, and he would sit for hours with his chin upon his hands glaring and frowning, all wrapped in the one idea.  This made him a bit of a butt among the men at first, and they laughed at him for it; but when they came to know him better they found that he was not a good man to laugh at, and then they dropped it.

We were early risers at that time, and the whole brigade was usually under arms at the flush of dawn.  One morning—­it was the sixteenth of June—­we had just formed up, and General Adams had ridden up to give some order to Colonel Reynell within a musket-length of where I stood, when suddenly they both stood staring along the Brussels road.  None of us dared move our heads, but every eye in the regiment whisked round, and there we saw an officer with the cockade of a general’s aide-de-camp thundering down the road as hard as a great dapple-grey horse could carry him.  He bent his face over its mane and flogged at its neck with the slack of the bridle, as though he rode for very life.