Sterne | Page 3

of a
regiment on the march--we may well pity these unresting followers of
the drum. As to Mrs. Sterne herself, she seems to have been a woman
of a pretty tough fibre, and she came moreover of a campaigning stock.
Her father was a "noted suttler" of the name of Nuttle, and her first
husband--for she was a widow when Roger Sterne married her--had
been a soldier also. She had, therefore, served some years'
apprenticeship to the military life before these wanderings began; and
she herself was destined to live to a good old age. But somehow or
other she failed to endow her offspring with her own robust
constitution and powers of endurance. "My father's children were," as
Laurence Sterne grimly puts it, "not made to last long;" but one cannot
help suspecting that it was the hardships of those early years which
carried them off in their infancy with such painful regularity and
despatch, and that it was to the same cause that their surviving brother
owed the beginnings of that fatal malady by which his own life was cut
short.
The diary of their travels--for the early part of Sterne's memoirs

amounts to scarcely more--is the more effective for its very brevity and
abruptness. Save for one interval of somewhat longer sojourn than
usual at Dublin, the reader has throughout it all the feeling of the
traveller who never finds time to unpack his portmanteau. On the
re-enrolment of the regiment in 1714, "our household," says the
narrative, "decamped from York with bag and baggage for Dublin.
Within a month my father left us, being ordered to Exeter; where, in a
sad winter, my mother and her two children followed him, travelling
from Liverpool, by land, to Plymouth." At Plymouth Mrs. Sterne gave
birth to a son, christened Joram; and, "in twelve months time we were
all sent back to Dublin. My mother," with her three children, "took ship
at Bristol for Ireland, and had a narrow escape from being cast away by
a leak springing up in the vessel. At length, after many perils and
struggles, we got to Dublin." Here intervenes the short breathing-space,
of which mention has been made--an interval employed by Roger
Sterne in "spending a great deal of money" on a "large house," which
he hired and furnished; and then "in the year one thousand seven
hundred and nineteen, all unhinged again." The regiment had been
ordered off to the Isle of Wight, thence to embark for Spain, on "the
Vigo Expedition," and "we," who accompanied it, "were driven into
Milford Haven, but afterwards landed at Bristol, and thence by land to
Plymouth again, and to the Isle of Wight;" losing on this expedition
"poor Joram, a pretty boy, who died of the smallpox." In the Isle of
Wight, Mrs. Sterne and her family remained till the Vigo Expedition
returned home; and during her stay there "poor Joram's loss was
supplied by the birth of a girl, Anne," a "pretty blossom," but destined
to fall "at the age of three years." On the return of the regiment to
Wicklow, Roger Sterne again sent to collect his family around him.
"We embarked for Dublin, and had all been cast away by a most violent
storm; but, through the intercession of my mother, the captain was
prevailed upon to turn back into Wales, where we stayed a month, and
at length got into Dublin, and travelled by land to Wicklow, where my
father had, for some weeks, given us over for lost." Here a year passed,
and another child, Devijeher--so called after the colonel of the
regiment--was born. "From thence we decamped to stay half a year
with Mr. Fetherston, a clergyman, about seven miles from Wicklow,
who, being a relative of my mother's, invited us to his parsonage at

Animo.[1]" From thence, again, "we followed the regiment to Dublin,"
where again "we lay in the barracks a year." In 1722 the regiment was
ordered to Carrickfergus. "We all decamped, but got no further than
Drogheda; thence ordered to Mullingar, forty miles west, where, by
Providence, we stumbled upon a kind relation, a collateral descendant
from Archbishop Sterne, who took us all to his castle, and kindly
entertained us for a year." Thence, by "a most rueful journey," to
Carrickfergus, where "we arrived in six or seven days." Here, at the age
of three, little Devijeher obtained a happy release from his name; and
"another child, Susan, was sent to fill his place, who also left us behind
in this weary journey." In the "autumn of this year, or the spring of the
next"--Sterne's memory failing in exactitude at the very point where we
should have expected it to be most precise--"my father obtained
permission of his colonel to fix me at school;" and henceforth the