At Boston, in 1775, a goat somewhat resented this exhibition, by breaking away from the mess-room, and rushing into the barracks with all his trappings on. There are few battlefields honourable to Britain where the Welsh Fusileers have not left their bones. The colours which wave over their ranks show a goodly list of hard-won honours--"bloody and hard-won honours," says a writer. "Arthur himself, Cadwallader, Glendower, and many an ancient Cambrian chief, might in ghostly form--if ghosts can grudge--envy their bold descendants the fame of these modern exploits, and confess that the lance and the corselet, the falchion and the mace, have done no greater deeds than those of the firelock and the buff-belt, the bayonet and sixty rounds of ball-cartridge." On their colours are the two badges of Edward the Black Prince--the Rising Sun and the Red Dragon; "a dragon addorsed gules, passant, on a mountain vert," as the heralds have it. This was the ancient symbol of the Cambrian Principality, with the significant motto, _Ich dien_, "I serve." And now, at the very time the Urgent was entering the Mediterranean, the regiment was on its way, with others, to win fresh laurels by the shores of the Black Sea; and with his horns gaily gilded, and a handsome, regimental, silver plate clasped on his forehead, Cameydd Llewellyn, whilom the caressed pet of the gentle Winny Lloyd, was landing with them at Kalamita Bay, and the hordes of Menschikoff were pouring forward from Sebastopol.[2]
We came in sight of Malta at daybreak on the 28th of September, and about noon dropped our anchor in the Marsamuscetta, or quarantine harbour, where all ships under the rank of a frigate must go. This celebrated isle, the master-key of the Mediterranean, the link that connects us with Egypt and India, was a new scene to me. Mostyn and some others on board the Urgent had been quartered there before, and while I was surveying the vast strength of its batteries of white sandstone, with those apparently countless cannon, that peer through the deep embrasures, or frown _en barbette_ over the sea; the quaint appearance of those streets of stairs, which Byron anathematised; the singular architecture of the houses, so Moorish in style and aspect, with heavy, overhanging balconies and flat roofs all connected, so that the dwellers therein can make a common promenade of them; the groups of picturesque, half-nude, and tawny Maltese; the monks and clerical students in rusty black cloaks and triangular hats; the Greek sailors, in short jackets and baggy blue breeches; the numbers of scarlet uniforms, and those of the Chasseurs de Vincennes (for two French three-deckers full of the latter had just come in); the naked boys who dived for halfpence in the harbour, and jabbered a dialect that was more Arabic than Italian--while surveying all this from the poop, through my field-glass, Mostyn was pointing out to me the great cathedral of St. John, some of the auberges of the knights, and anticipating the pleasure of a fruit lunch in the Strada Reale, a drive to Monte Benjemma, a dinner at Morell's, in the Strada Forni, a cigar on the ramparts, and then dropping into the opera-house, which was built by the Grand-master Manoel Vilhena, and where the best singers from La Scala may be heard in the season; and Price of ours was already soft and poetical in the ideas of faldettas of lace, black eyes, short skirts, and taper ankles, and anticipating or suggesting various soft things. While the soldiers clustered in the waist, as thick as bees, the officers were all busy with their lorgnettes on the poop, or in preparation for a run ashore, when the bells of Valetta began to ring a merry peal, the ships in the harbour to show all their colours, and a gun flashed redly from the massive granite ramparts of St. Elmo, a place of enormous strength, having in its lower bastions a sunk barrack, capable of holding two thousand infantry.