Tracks of a Rolling Stone | Page 5

- and his fox terrier Nettle, which, as a special favour, I was allowed to feed with Abernethy biscuits.
He was at Longford, my present home, on a visit to my father in 1835, when, one evening after dinner, the two old gentlemen - no one else being present but myself - sitting in armchairs over the fire, finishing their bottle of port, Lord Lynedoch told the wonderful story of his adventures during the siege of Mantua by the French, in 1796. For brevity's sake, it were better perhaps to give the outline in the words of Alison. 'It was high time the Imperialists should advance to the relief of this fortress, which was now reduced to the last extremity from want of provisions. At a council of war held in the end of December, it was decided that it was indispensable that instant intelligence should be sent to Alvinzi of their desperate situation. An English officer, attached to the garrison, volunteered to perform the perilous mission, which he executed with equal courage and success. He set out, disguised as a peasant, from Mantua on December 29, at nightfall in the midst of a deep fall of snow, eluded the vigilance of the French patrols, and, after surmounting a thousand hardships and dangers, arrived at the headquarters of Alvinzi, at Bassano, on January 4, the day after the conferences at Vicenza were broken up.
'Great destinies awaited this enterprising officer. He was Colonel Graham, afterwards victor at Barrosa, and the first British general who planted the English standard on the soil of France.'
This bare skeleton of the event was endued 'with sense and soul' by the narrator. The 'hardships and dangers' thrilled one's young nerves. Their two salient features were ice perils, and the no less imminent one of being captured and shot as a spy. The crossing of the rivers stands out prominently in my recollection. All the bridges were of course guarded, and he had two at least within the enemy's lines to get over - those of the Mincio and of the Adige. Probably the lagunes surrounding the invested fortress would be his worst difficulty. The Adige he described as beset with a two-fold risk - the avoidance of the bridges, which courted suspicion, and the thin ice and only partially frozen river, which had to be traversed in the dark. The vigour, the zest with which the wiry veteran 'shoulder'd his crutch and show'd how fields were won' was not a thing to be forgotten.
Lord Lynedoch lived to a great age, and it was from his house at Cardington, in Bedfordshire, that my brother Leicester married his first wife, Miss Whitbread, in 1843. That was the last time I saw him.
Perhaps the following is not out of place here, although it is connected with more serious thoughts:
Though neither my father nor my mother were more pious than their neighbours, we children were brought up religiously. From infancy we were taught to repeat night and morning the Lord's Prayer, and invoke blessings on our parents. It was instilled into us by constant repetition that God did not love naughty children - our naughtiness being for the most part the original sin of disobedience, rooted in the love of forbidden fruit in all its forms of allurement. Moses himself could not have believed more faithfully in the direct and immediate intervention of an avenging God. The pain in one's stomach incident to unripe gooseberries, no less than the consequent black dose, or the personal chastisement of a responsible and apprehensive nurse, were but the just visitations of an offended Deity.
Whether my religious proclivities were more pronounced than those of other children I cannot say, but certainly, as a child, I was in the habit of appealing to Omnipotence to gratify every ardent desire.
There were peacocks in the pleasure grounds at Holkham, and I had an aesthetic love for their gorgeous plumes. As I hunted under and amongst the shrubs, I secretly prayed that my search might be rewarded. Nor had I a doubt, when successful, that my prayer had been granted by a beneficent Providence.
Let no one smile at this infantine credulity, for is it not the basis of that religious trust which helps so many of us to support the sorrows to which our stoicism is unequal? Who that might be tempted thoughtlessly to laugh at the child does not sometimes sustain the hope of finding his 'plumes' by appeals akin to those of his childhood? Which of us could not quote a hundred instances of such a soothing delusion - if delusion it be? I speak not of saints, but of sinners: of the countless hosts who aspire to this world's happiness; of the dying who would live, of the suffering who would die, of the poor who