THE STAFF OFFICER; OR, THE SOLDIER OF FORTUNE. A TALE OF REAL LIFE. BY OLIVER MOORE.C The web of our life is of a mingled yarn; good and ill together. Our IN THREE VOLUMES. VOL. I. LONDON: PRINTED FOR COCHRANE AND PICKERSGILL, 11, WATERLOO PLACE, PALL MALL, 1831. THE STAFF OFFICER; OR, THE SOLDIER OF FORTUNE. CHAPTER I. I ran it through Even from my boyish days! A MAN's actions during the first years of his life are so little dependent on himself, that he can neither claim much merit for any virtue they exhibit, nor incur great blame for their folly. The good and the evil of our childhood properly belong to the parent or guardian whose authority we are bound to respect, and whose example we are taught to imitate. From my fifth year to the age of eight I was doomed to endure the horrors of a preparatory school, kept by a prim old maid, under the discipline of whose thimble finger my head smarted ten times a day for alleged stupidity. But at that joyous stage of life, being released from the petticoat, I was entered on the roll of junior boys at a large academy near Trinity College, Dublin, where my two senior brothers had already been established upwards of two years. The elder was from my earliest recollections an eccentric boy, reserved even to bashfulness in manner; cold, formal, and pedantic in address ; embarrassed, if not awkward, in carriage: although with a personal appearance every way prepossessing, he seldom made his way in company; tormented with morbid sensitiveness of feeling, which formed the great drawback on his youthful pleasures, he was perpetually fancying some slight or neglect, where none was ever contemplated; his noble sense of justice in all his schoolboy transactions, his inflexible fidelity to truth, even under the terrors of that punishment which was ever sure to follow the avowal of any act of insubordination or misconduct, had much endeared him to the regard of our worthy master, whose feelings were oftentimes placed in painful conflict with his duty. But having one hundred of us to control, the benevolent wishes of the kindest and best of hearts were forced to yield to stern duty. Excellent man! how well do I recollect his pompous strut across the brief court-yard which separated the school-room from his house of residence, and the audible hawks! and hems! with which he never failed to give tidings of his approach. The boisterous noise of five score tongues, and twice as many hands, was in an instant subdued into broken murmurs, and before his well-powdered head displayed its snowy honors in the school-room, all was mute, save the soft hum of affected application to the lessons of the morning. With buckles bright as his own imagination— shoes like polished ebony-broad-striped silk stockings, (erst called patent,) with toes most gracefully pointed, in measured pace he moved on towards his throne, kindly returning those respectful salutations which the senior boys, spite of their flushed and moistened brows, and still panting breasts, presumed to bestow. Our master was of commanding figure and fine countenance-an |