The old woman, as I delivered these touching words, stared, snapped, and ground her teeth, like an enraged monkey.  Julia was now red, now white; the Colonel stretched forward, took the fork out of the calf of my leg, wiped it, and then seized a bundle of letters which I had remarked by his side.

“A cornet!” said he, in a voice choking with emotion; “a pitiful, beggarly Irish cornet aspire to the hand of Julia Jowler!  Gag, Gahagan, are you mad, or laughing at us?  Look at these letters, young man—­at these letters, I say—­one hundred and twenty-four epistles from every part of India (not including one from the Governor-General, and six from his brother, Colonel Wellesley,)—­one hundred and twenty-four proposals for the hand of Miss Jowler!  Cornet Gahagan,” he continued, “I wish to think well of you:  you are the bravest, the most modest, and, perhaps, the handsomest man in our corps; but you have not got a single rupee.  You ask me for Julia, and you do not possess even an anna!”—­(Here the old rogue grinned, as if he had made a capital pun).—­“No, no,” said he, waxing good-natured; “Gagy, my boy, it is nonsense!  Julia, love, retire with your mamma; this silly young gentleman will remain and smoke a pipe with me.”

I took one; it was the bitterest chillum I ever smoked in my life.

*****

I am not going to give here an account of my military services; they will appear in my great national autobiography, in forty volumes, which I am now preparing for the press.  I was with my regiment in all Wellesley’s brilliant campaigns; then taking dawk, I travelled across the country north-eastward, and had the honor of fighting by the side of Lord Lake at Laswaree, Deeg, Furruckabad, Futtyghur, and Bhurtpore:  but I will not boast of my actions—­the military man knows them, my sovereign appreciates them.  If asked who was the bravest man of the Indian army, there is not an officer belonging to it who would not cry at once, Gahagan.  The fact is, I was desperate:  I cared not for life, deprived of Julia Jowler.

With Julia’s stony looks ever before my eyes, her father’s stern refusal in my ears, I did not care, at the close of the campaign, again to seek her company or to press my suit.  We were eighteen months on service, marching and countermarching, and fighting almost every other day:  to the world I did not seem altered; but the world only saw the face, and not the seared and blighted heart within me.  My valor, always desperate, now reached to a pitch of cruelty; I tortured my grooms and grass-cutters for the most trifling offence or error,—­I never in action spared a man,—­I sheared off three hundred and nine heads in the course of that single campaign.