I have said I was but four-and-twenty then. When I had last traversed
that line of rail, it was in the sweet season of summer, when the
heather was purple on the Lammermuirs; and a sea of golden grain clothed
all the lovely valley of the Tyne. I was proceeding to join my
regiment, a raw, heedless, and impulsive boy, with bright hope and vague
ambition in his heart, and with a poor mother’s tears yet wet upon his
cheek.

I had been six years with the lancers, and four of these were spent in
India. While there, my dear mother died; and the memory of the last
time when I saw her kind and affectionate face, and heard her broken
voice, as she prayed God to bless my departing steps, came vividly,
powerfully, and painfully before me.

It was on the morning when I was to leave home and her to join the
corps. Overnight, with all a boy’s vanity and glowing satisfaction, I
had contemplated my gay lancer trappings, had buckled on my sword,
placed the gold cartouche-belt and glittering epaulettes on my
shoulders.

At that moment I would not have exchanged my cornetcy for the kingdom of
Scotland. These alluring trappings were the last things I thought of
and looked on ere my eyes were closed by slumber, and the grey dawn of
the next eventful day saw them still lying unpacked on the floor, when
my poor mother, pale, anxious, unslept, and with her sad eyes full of
tears, and her heart wrung with sorrow, stole softly into my room, to
look for the last time upon her sleeping boy, and her mournful and
earnest face was the first sight that met my waking eyes, when roused by
a tear that dropped upon my cheek.

I started up, and all the consciousness of the great separation that was
to ensue–the terrible wrench of heart from heart that was to
come–burst upon me. Then sword and epaulettes, cap and plume, and the
lancers, were forgotten; and throwing my arms around her neck, as I had
done in the days of childish grief, I wept like the boy I was, rather
than the man I had imagined myself to be.

I was going home now; but I should see that beloved face no more, and
her voice was hushed for ever.

In that home were others, who were kind and gentle, and who loved me
well, awaiting my arrival, and to welcome me. And there was my cousin
Cora Calderwood–she was unmarried still.

Cora I was about to see again. It seemed long, long since we had last
met, though we had frequently corresponded, for my uncle had a horror of
letter-writing; and certain it was that she had inspired the first
emotion of love in my schoolboy heart, and during my sojourn in India,
and amid the whirl and gaiety of barrack-life at Bath, at Maidstone, at
Canterbury and elsewhere, her image had lingered in my mind, more as a
pleasing memory connected with ideas of Scotland and my home, rather
than with those of a passionate or enduring attachment.

Indeed, I had just been on the point of forming that elsewhere; but now,
having no immediate attraction beside me, I began to wonder whether Cora
had grown up a beauty; how tall she was, whether she was engaged, and so
forth; whether she still remembered with pleasure the young playmate who
had left her sorely dissolved in tears, half lover and wholly friend.

As we progressed northward, and crossed the Firth of Forth, the snow
almost entirely disappeared, save on the lofty summits of the Ochil
mountains, whose slopes looked green and pleasant in the meridian sun;
and my friend Studhome, had he been with me, might have been much
surprised in finding the atmosphere warmer north of Stirling Bridge than
we found it at Maidstone–so variable is our climate.

We changed carriages at Stirling, where I was to imbibe some hot coffee,
while Pitblado looked after my baggage, and swore in no measured terms
at the slowness of an old, cynical, and hard-visaged porter, on whose
brass badge was engraved a wolf–the badge of Stirling.

“Now then, look alive, you old duffer!” I heard Willie shouting.

“Ou, aye!” replied the other slowly, with a grin on his weather-beaten
and saturnine face; “ye think yoursel’ a braw chiel in your mustaches
and laced jacket–there was a time when I thocht mysel’ one too.”

“What do you mean?” asked Pitblado, whose dragoon air even his livery
failed to conceal.

“Mean!” retorted the other; “why, I mean that at the point o’ the
bayonet I helped to carry Badajoz and Ciudad Rodrigo to boot; and now,
for sax baubees, I’m thankfu’ to carry your bag. Sae muckle for
sodgerin’!”

“It is not very encouraging, certainly,” said my man, with a smile.

“Ten years’ service, two wounds, and a deferred pension of threepence
per diem,” growled the other, as he threw my traps, with an oath, on the
roof of the carriage.

“What regiment, my friend?” I inquired.

“The old Scots brigade, second battalion, sir,” he replied, with a
salute, as I slipped a trifle into his hand.

“The weather seems open and fine here.”

“Aye,” said he, with another saturnine grin; “but a green yule maketh a
fat kirkyard.”

In five minutes more we were _en route_, sweeping along the little
lonely branch line, that through grassy glens, where the half-frozen
runnels oozed or gurgled among withered reeds and bracken bushes, led us
into the heart of Fife–“the kingdom,” as the Scots call it; not that it
ever was so in any time of antiquity, but because the peninsular county
contains within its compact and industrious self every means and
requisite for the support of its inhabitants, independent of the produce
of the whole external world–at least, such is their boast.