Whilst this parley was going on, three officers on horseback, on the French side, appeared at some little distance, and stopped as if eying us, when one of them left the other two, and rode close up to us who were by the stream.  “Look, look!” says the Royal Cravat, with great agitation, “pas lui, that’s he; not him, l’autre,” and pointed to the distant officer on a chestnut horse, with a cuirass shining in the sun, and over it a broad blue ribbon.

“Please to take Mr. Hamilton’s services to my Lord Marlborough—­my Lord Duke,” says the gentleman in English:  and, looking to see that the party were not hostilely disposed, he added, with a smile, “There’s a friend of yours, gentlemen, yonder; he bids me to say that he saw some of your faces on the 11th of September last year.”

As the gentleman spoke, the other two officers rode up, and came quite close.  We knew at once who it was.  It was the King, then two-and-twenty years old, tall and slim, with deep brown eyes, that looked melancholy, though his lips wore a smile.  We took off our hats and saluted him.  No man, sure, could see for the first time, without emotion, the youthful inheritor of so much fame and misfortune.  It seemed to Mr. Esmond that the Prince was not unlike young Castlewood, whose age and figure he resembled.  The Chevalier de St. George acknowledged the salute, and looked at us hard.  Even the idlers on our side of the river set up a hurrah.  As for the Royal Cravat, he ran to the Prince’s stirrup, knelt down and kissed his boot, and bawled and looked a hundred ejaculations and blessings.  The prince bade the aide-de-camp give him a piece of money; and when the party saluting us had ridden away, Cravat spat upon the piece of gold by way of benediction, and swaggered away, pouching his coin and twirling his honest carroty moustache.

The officer in whose company Esmond was, the same little captain of Handyside’s regiment, Mr. Sterne, who had proposed the garden at Lille, when my Lord Mohun and Esmond had their affair, was an Irishman too, and as brave a little soul as ever wore a sword.  “Bedad,” says Roger Sterne, “that long fellow spoke French so beautiful that I shouldn’t have known he wasn’t a foreigner, till he broke out with his hulla-ballooing, and only an Irish calf can bellow like that.”  And Roger made another remark in his wild way, in which there was sense as well as absurdity—­“If that young gentleman,” says he, “would but ride over to our camp, instead of Villars’s, toss up his hat and say, ’Here am I, the King, who’ll follow me?’ by the Lord, Esmond, the whole army would rise and carry him home again, and beat Villars, and take Paris by the way.”

The news of the Prince’s visit was all through the camp quickly, and scores of ours went down in hopes to see him.  Major Hamilton, whom we had talked with, sent back by a trumpet several silver pieces for officers with us.  Mr. Esmond received one of these; and that medal, and a recompense not uncommon amongst Princes, were the only rewards he ever had from a Royal person, whom he endeavored not very long after to serve.