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Updated: August 7, 2024
For she saw the glint in the farmer's eye; and so Sergeant Basket slept bolt upright that night in an arm-chair by the parlour fender. Next day the dragooners searched the town again, and were billeted all about among the cottages.
Once more the dragooners are after me not five minutes away. You must lend me a horse, and at once." "Nay," said a voice in the doorway, "the horse, if lent, is for me!" Joan turn'd, and the two women stood looking at each other; the one with dark wonder, the other with cold disdainfulness and I between them scarce lifting my eyes.
It was a riddle I could not read, but as I stood there, peering round the half-open lattice at the scene below, I was happier than ever I had been in my life. "Poor old Jack," said I to myself, "sweating and swearing over your riff-raff dragooners, and here am I, who envied you yester-morn, on the top rung of life." "We shall get it if we're late," said Mistress Margaret playfully in my ear.
In less than five minutes the last batch of dragooners had cursed and spurred themselves out of sight, and the bright moon shone down on a road once more bare and white save for a few scattered patches of black. The Colonel uncovered the mare's head and nuzzled her. All he said was, but that very gleefully, "Geordie, my boy, I'll be routing you out of St. James's within the fortnight.
"Then where be the King's forces?" I made shift to enquire by signs. "March'd out o' Launceston to-day, lad an' but a biscuit a man between 'em, poor dears for Stratton Heath, i' the nor'-east, where the rebels be encamp'd. Heard by scouts o' these gentry bein' sent to Bodmin, and were minded to fight th' Earl o' Stamford whiles his dragooners was away.
But one November morning 'twas whispered abroad that Uncle Philip had made his way to Falmouth, and slipped across to Guernsey. Time passed on, and the dragooners were seen no more, nor the handsome devil-may-care face of Sergeant Basket.
You may call them the kingdom's anatomy before the weekly calendar; for such is a diurnal, the day of the month with what weather in the commonwealth. It is taken for the pulse of the body politic, and the empiric divines of the assembly, those spiritual dragooners, thumb it accordingly.
"Dragooners!" shouts my father; and then, running to the side of the tower facing the harvest-field, he put both hands to his mouth and called: "What have 'ee? What have 'ee?" very loud and long. "A neck a neck!" came back from the field, like as if all shouted at once dear, the sweet sound!
Some thirty Highlanders, mostly Macdonalds, picked dare-devils, had been mounted and turned into dragooners, and I, thanks to the Colonel, had been made Captain over them. "The lad's no experience, but he's got sense," he said to my lord George Murray. "I ken him weel aneugh," said his lordship. "He threatened to knock my head off. D'ye ca' that sense, Kit Waynflete?"
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