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When I was a lad of twenty I was desperately in love with Miss Constance Pleyel, or thought I was, which at that time of life is pretty much the same thing." "It will serve at any time of life," said the baroness. She listened with an air of aversion and impatience, which made a painful task more painful to perform. "My father was a half-pay officer," I went on, "very poor and very proud.
"That's a fluke, because I was educated at the Scotch convent with these dear old absurd nuns who were Gordons, and Camerons, and Macdonalds, and did n't know a word of English." "Who can manage her horse like a rough-rider," continued the General, counting on his finger, "and dance like a Frenchwoman, and play whist like a half-pay officer, and "
She was a lady of good Welsh family, who after many years of genteel poverty had come into a legacy of seven thousand pounds from an East Indian uncle; and my father a simple liver, content with his half-pay had much ado in his blindness to keep watch and war upon the luxuries she untiringly strove to smuggle upon him.
By the final clause of this bill, martial law was extended to all officers on half-pay; and the same arguments which had been urged against this article in the navy-bill, were now repeated and reinforced with redoubled fervour.
Some indefinite resolutions were passed, but nothing was done as to the commutation of half-pay into a fixed sum, and after such a display of indifference the dissatisfaction increased rapidly, and the army became more and more restless.
Richard Darrien, it seemed, had been in Africa about five years, his father having emigrated there on the death of his mother, as he had nothing but the half-pay of a retired naval captain, and he hoped to better his fortunes in a new land. He had been granted a farm in the Graaf-Reinet district, but like many other of the early settlers, met with misfortunes.
Take care of all the poor that apply to you, but leave the half-pay classes to a different style of doctor, the people who spend one half their time in taking care of their patients, and the other half in squeezing out their money. Go for the swell-fronts and south-exposure houses; the folks inside are just as good as other people, and the pleasantest, on the whole, to take care of.
The Cafe Foy, in the Palais Royal, was the principal place of rendezvous for the Prussian officers, and to this cafe the French officers on half-pay frequently proceeded in order to pick quarrels with their foreign invaders; swords were quickly drawn, and frequently the most bloody frays took place: these originated not in any personal hatred, but from national jealousy on the part of the French, who could not bear the sight of foreign soldiers in their capital; which, ruled by the great captain of the age, had, like Rome, influenced the rest of the world.
The world and his necessities made him what he was; for many were the times, for years afterwards, that he would in his reveries surmise how happy he might have been in his own wild country, where half-pay would have been competence, had his Judith been spared to him, and he could have laid his head upon her bosom.
On the Nymphe rejoining her, the two frigates went in pursuit of the enemy as far as Cherbourg. Thence Captain Pellew proceeded to the North Channel, where some French cruisers were reported to have gone; but having swept the Channel without seeing anything of them, and taken on board his brother Israel, then living, a commander on half-pay, at Larne, he returned to Falmouth.