The Marshal only muttered to a General beside him, “Why don’t they all ride like that man?  He has the seat of the English Guards.”  But that it was in truth an officer of the English Guards, and a friend of his own, who paced past him as a private of Algerian Horse, the French leader never dreamed.

From the extremes of luxury, indolence, indulgence, pleasure, and extravagance, Cecil came to the extremes of hardship, poverty, discipline, suffering, and toil.  From a life where every sense was gratified, he came to a life where every privation was endured.  He had led the fashion; he came where he had to bear without a word the curses, oaths, and insults of a corporal or a sous-lieutenant.  He had been used to every delicacy and delight; he came where he had to take the coarse black bread of the army as a rich repast.  He had thought it too much trouble to murmur flatteries in great ladies’ ears; he came where morning, noon, and night the inexorable demands of rigid rules compelled his incessant obedience, vigilance, activity, and self-denial.  He had known nothing from his childhood up except an atmosphere of amusement, refinement, brilliancy, and idleness; he came where gnawing hunger, brutalized jest, ceaseless toil, coarse obscenity, agonized pain, and pandemonaic mirth alternately filled the measure of the days.

A sharper contrast, a darker ordeal, rarely tried the steel of any man’s endurance.  No Spartan could have borne the change more mutely, more staunchly than did the “dandy of the Household.”

The first years were, it is true, years of intense misery to him.  Misery, when all the blood glowed in him under some petty tyrant’s jibe, and he had to stand immovable, holding his peace.  Misery, when hunger and thirst of long marches tortured him, and his soul sickened at the half-raw offal, and the water thick with dust, and stained with blood, which the men round him seized so ravenously.  Misery, when the dreary dawn broke, only to usher in a day of mechanical maneuvers, of petty tyrannies, of barren, burdensome hours in the exercise-ground, of convoy duty in the burning sun-glare, and under the heat of harness; and the weary night fell with the din and uproar, and the villainous blasphemy and befouled merriment of the riotous barracks, that denied even the peace and oblivion of sleep.  They were years of infinite wretchedness oftentimes, only relieved by the loyalty and devotion of the man who had followed him into his exile.  But, however wretched, they never wrung a single regret or lament from Cecil.  He had come out to this life; he took it as it was.  As, having lost the title to command, the high breeding in him made him render implicitly the mute obedience which was the first duty of his present position, so it made him accept, from first to last, without a sign of complaint or of impatience, the altered fortunes of his career.  The hardest-trained, lowest-born, longest-inured soldier in the Zephyr ranks did not