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A manager directed all their performances. They aimed at perfect rhythm in their chants and dances, and grace and often sheer fun in their pantomimes. Some were wrestlers, but boxing they left for others. As with the Marquesans to-day, they had a fugleman, or leader, in all songs, who introduced the subject in a prologue, and occasionally gave the cue to a change.
The order reached me near mid-day at a resting halt of the corps, and with bared heads my staff listened to the reading. We then greeted it with three cheers, I myself acting as fugleman, and the tidings sped down the column on the wings of the wind.
As the procession started, all on board waved their caps and broke out singing. They were Cornish-men and knew no music-hall songs "It's a long way to Tipperary" or anything of the sort. Led by a fugleman in the first brake, they started singing it in fine harmonies "He's the Lily of the Valley, O my soul!"
'One cheer more, screamed the little fugleman in the balcony, and out shouted the mob again, as if lungs were cast-iron, with steel works. 'Slumkey for ever! roared the honest and independent. 'Slumkey for ever! echoed Mr. Pickwick, taking off his hat. 'No Fizkin! roared the crowd. 'Certainly not! shouted Mr. Pickwick.
Now and then, in order that my fears might not be excited, he would stoop down and pull a turnip; but I was too good a soldier myself to be out-generalled in this manner. I stood from my work, the better to observe the enemy's movements, and kept my eye upon the fugleman. At last, I saw him make preparations to arrange his whip; so I immediately arranged my legs for a start.
The only thing was, that Bourhope was so disturbed and so distracted in his mind that he could not attend to orders, and lost his character as a yeoman, and all chance of being future fugleman to his corps. And this, although the Major had said, when the drills began, that there was not a finer man or more promising dragoon than Bourhope in the regiment.
They must have found glasses, though I could not remember to have seen any in the vault, for a minute later fugleman Ratsey spoke again 'Now, lads, glasses full and bumpers for a toast.
"How, sir, do all the members take the manoeuvres from this fugleman?" "All the Horizontals, sir the Perpendiculars having a fugleman of their own." "Well, gentlemen, I conceive this to be an affair in which I am no judge, and I put myself entirely in the hands of my friends."
Them there traps should be sold, and you get the money they brings; and if you don't keep your eye on the fugleman, he will do you out of half of them." He further said, that, when he enlisted, he got more than five shillings for his things.
But how much better than the barren triumph of being the unconscious fugleman of so glittering a popularity must have been the sense of being one of the first that ever burst from our rude island upon that secluded little Piedmontese town, as it then was, of not above twelve thousand souls, with its wonderful situation, noble perspective and unparalleled climate.
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