If ever your ghost-seer extends his nocturnal saunterings towards Ballyfermot, about “the wee sma’ hours ayont the twal,” let him have an eye out for a large white jug with a red nightcap and a pair of green goggles; for as surely as drunken spirits are permitted to revisit the glimpses of the moon, in that place and at such an hour will the schoolmaster be abroad.
Upon the dispersion of our own royal regiment, the Macleod Fencibles took up their quarters in the barrack, which thereupon stank horribly of cockaleekie every morning. A raw, wild, breekless tribe they were, fresh caught from the Highlands, at a period when the Trossachs were as inaccessible to the foot of civilised man as the Kyber Pass. The chief of the clan had collected and regimented them, selecting his own officers from the sons of his tacksmen and reivers, and few members of the mess could speak a dozen consecutive words of good English. The colonel, a fiery old Gael, and “vengeance proud,” did his best to lick them into form, using his knuckles occasionally, it was said, for that purpose; and, indeed, a vigorous discipline was needful. They wrangled at dinner for the choice morsels of the various joints, three or four knives and forks being sometimes plunged at the same moment into one leg of mutton; and upon a certain occasion, when a large turbot was served, those who sat near the would-be carver saved him the trouble of apportioning it, by forking it away upon their own plates with their long bony fingers. This vexed the colonel exceedingly; for there were strangers at the table who had never dined at a Fencible mess before. For a whole week, therefore, he condemned them to leek-porridge, which was eaten with a spoon, while all the regimental pipers, seated (more Scotico) at the end of the apartment, blew “Cauld Kail,” and other appetizing “refreins,” to bring them to an improving sense of the privations they were enduring. Many of those caterans were afterwards drafted into the general service, and attained the highest honours awarded to good soldiership. These, indeed, came to them by nature; but the acquisition of the manners of gentlemen was not so easy; yet more than one of the individuals, who scrambled on that memorable occasion for the turbot, have been deemed worthy to sit down at royal banquets, and were justly classed amongst the flower of North British chivalry.
The Carlow militia came next, a polite corps, but numbering some strange twists among its subalterns. The adjutant, one Clifford, had been raised from the ranks by the favour and discernment of Colonel Latouche. He was a humorous fellow, of a manly, independent mind, and scorned to hang his head at the remembrance of his origin. The General of Division, dining at the mess on the occasion of a quarterly inspection, complimented Clifford upon the excellent state of drill in which he found the regiment, and, alluding to his name, asked “if he had any relations on the staff?”
“No, General,” he replied, “but I have a great number on the spade.”
It happened, on some occasion, that he displeased his colonel, who, in a hasty moment, declared his regret at having raised him from the state in which he had found him.
“Then, Colonel Latouche,” said Clifford, “you are the first of your name that ever was sorry for doing a good action.”
It is scarcely necessary to say that so adroit and just a compliment replaced him at once in his good patron’s favour.
The pride of the old barrack was sorely tried afterwards, by various incursions of featherbeds which came in successively with the Wicklow, South Mayo, North Downshire, and Limerick regiments. Your shell-jacket dandies of this day would stare at the half-moon-shaped cocked hats, black leggings with innumerable small buttons, and draggle-tailed coats of their predecessors. But the hair-powder was worse than all. Can I ever forget Bob Gloster, of the Garryowens, on his return from the grand review one broiling Fourth of June, wiping away, with the sleeve of his new scarlet uniform, the streams of liquefied flour that meandered down his cheeks, and bewailing the day that he had “ever left the sweet English Town,9 where he might have been reared up to an imminent marchant, to be melted out of creation like an althar-candle.” Bob volunteered, shortly afterwards, into “the Line,” and became well used to the “melting mood” in Spain, where he soon earned for himself a pair of spurs; and when he came home, after the peace of Paris, Major Gloster, quite a polished cavalier, with a fine military accent, I should have liked to see the man who would remind him of his early chances of “imminence” in the mercantile line. It was of such materials that heroes were manufactured; and I could enumerate at least a dozen “ragged colts” who left that old barrack, in the midst of scenes of riot and drunkenness incidental to the volunteering system, and turned out “bra’ chargers” at Vittoria, or on the plain of Waterloo.
But Chapelizod was not always a mere depot of Fencibles and militia. It was for a good while the headquarters of the 92nd, or Gordon Highlanders, so truly described in Captain Grant’s charming romance. They marched in, all brown and shrivelled by the sands of Egypt, though some years had passed since they had been there. A grave, orderly, religious body of men they were, who seemed always conscious that they were only here for a breathing time, and could not long be spared from the field of death. Their leader was Major Cameron, “the Fassifern,” who ended his career of glory at Waterloo. Authors who write “stories founded on facts” take a license to embellish their materials, and to exaggerate the moral as well as the physical attributes of the persons whom they introduce, according
