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As gun after gun, with its complement of men and its lieutenant fireworkers, with a 'right wheel, rolled out of the gate upon the broad street, not a soul could look upon the lengthening pageant of blue and scarlet, with its symmetrical diagonals of snowy belt and long-flapped white cartouche boxes, moving together with measured swing; its laced cocked-hats, leggings, and courtly white shorts and vests, and ruffles, and all its buttons and brasses flashing up to the sun, without allowing it was a fine spirited sight.
Will the Commander-in-Chief be offended? Will the Government of India be angry? What will the Service say? The old Colonel is always rather suspicious of the great cocked-hats at head-quarters. He knows that to maintain an air of activity they must still be changing something or abolishing something, and he is always afraid that they will change or abolish him.
He had his bad days. There was, for example, that trouble with the river. He made little boats out of whole newspapers, an art he learnt by watching the Spender boy, and he set them sailing down the stream great paper cocked-hats.
They were all six feet high. They all wore bouquets of the richest flowers: they wore bags, their hair slightly powdered, brilliant shoulder-knots, and cocked-hats laced with gold.
"There is the order for it, sir; but the cocked-hats are kept in the chest up in the main-top, and as for the dirk, you must apply to the butcher, who has them under his charge." I went up with the order, and thought I would first apply for the dirk; so I inquired for the butcher, whom I found sitting in the sheep-pen with the sheep, mending his trowsers.
My worldly effects consisted of a hat, which had once been round, but which, from my continually turning and twisting it into the shape of cocked-hats, road-hats, soldiers' caps, &c., was now any shape you wished; a little fustian jacket; waistcoat of the same material; a coarse shirt, which, from a violent shaking fit, was completely in rags; a pair of leathers, intolerably fat and greasy; ribbed worsted stockings; and a thwacking pair of high-lows, nailed from heel to toe.
A magnificent sight it was, to behold him in his blouse, a feeble little jog-trot rustic, swept along by the wind of two immense gendarmes, in cocked-hats for which the street was hardly wide enough, each carrying a bundle of stolen property that would not have held his shoulder-knot, and clanking a sabre that dwarfed the prisoner.
Sometimes, in the morning, five hundred men or more garrison artillery, engineers, and infantry muster there, previous to marching to their posts; there is a banging of drums, a blowing of bugles, a bobbing vision of cocked-hats, and a roar of hoarse words of command all the pomp and pride and circumstance of glorious war before the fighting begins.
That story of Sir Thomas Sadman dropping a pocket-handkerchief in his court at Colombo, which the Queen's Advocate O'Goggarty picked up, and on which Laura MacS. was embroidered, whilst the Major was absolutely in the witness-box giving evidence against a native servant who had stolen one of his cocked-hats that story always made good Thomas Newcome laugh, and Clive used to enjoy it too, and the widow's mischievous fun in narrating it; and now, behold, one day when Mrs.
We can all laugh when we read of Indian chiefs wearing uniform-coats, and cocked-hats, without any other articles of attire; but we cannot imagine inconsistencies in our own cases, that are almost as absurd in the eyes of highly sophisticated and conventional usages. To me, at that age, there was nothing in the least out of the way, in Mrs.
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