discontented with his fate, and with the vocation into which that drove him, and thinking, with a secret indignation, that the cassock and bands, and the very sacred office with which he had once proposed to invest himself, were, in fact, but marks of a servitude which was to continue all his life long.  For, disguise it as he might to himself, he had all along felt that to be Castlewood’s chaplain was to be Castlewood’s inferior still, and that his life was but to be a long, hopeless servitude.  So, indeed, he was far from grudging his old friend Tom Tusher’s good fortune (as Tom, no doubt, thought it).  Had it been a mitre and Lambeth which his friends offered him, and not a small living and a country parsonage, he would have felt as much a slave in one case as in the other, and was quite happy and thankful to be free.

The bravest man I ever knew in the army, and who had been present in most of King William’s actions, as well as in the campaigns of the great Duke of Marlborough, could never be got to tell us of any achievement of his, except that once Prince Eugene ordered him up a tree to reconnoitre the enemy, which feat he could not achieve on account of the horseman’s boots he wore; and on another day that he was very nearly taken prisoner because of these jack-boots, which prevented him from running away.  The present narrator shall imitate this laudable reserve, and doth not intend to dwell upon his military exploits, which were in truth not very different from those of a thousand other gentlemen.  This first campaign of Mr. Esmond’s lasted but a few days; and as a score of books have been written concerning it, it may be dismissed very briefly here.

When our fleet came within view of Cadiz, our commander sent a boat with a white flag and a couple of officers to the Governor of Cadiz, Don Scipio de Brancaccio, with a letter from his Grace, in which he hoped that as Don Scipio had formerly served with the Austrians against the French, ’twas to be hoped that his Excellency would now declare himself against the French King, and for the Austrian in the war between King Philip and King Charles.  But his Excellency, Don Scipio, prepared a reply, in which he announced that, having served his former king with honor and fidelity, he hoped to exhibit the same loyalty and devotion towards his present sovereign, King Philip V.; and by the time this letter was ready, the two officers had been taken to see the town, and the alameda, and the theatre, where bull-fights are fought, and the convents, where the admirable works of Don Bartholomew Murillo inspired one of them with a great wonder and delight—­such as he had never felt before—­concerning this divine art of painting; and these sights over, and a handsome refection and chocolate being served to the English gentlemen, they were accompanied back to their shallop with every courtesy, and were the only two officers of the English army that saw at that time that famous city.