The winter of ’61 was an unusually severe one, and the river that washed the walls of the grim old Tower was covered with a thick coating of ice, which in its turn afforded a convenient asylum for the dead cats and other refuse that drifted upon it from the neighbourhood of the adjoining wharves. Locomotion in those pre-Embankment and underground railway days was not so convenient as now, and as cabs had practically ceased running by reason of the mountains of snow intervening between the Tower and the Monument, I had, together with a few boon companions, decided that the time had come for a migration, and went in for “first leave.”
And the choice we had made was by no means an unhappy one, for the weather that had made existence in London well nigh intolerable had driven the woodcocks into the coverts, and we all declared that a week of such surroundings would compensate for all the vicissitudes we had undergone from Kangaroos, Tower, and five o’clock bacon and eggs in London. The “route,” too, had come, and we reasoned, not unwisely, that the journey to Ireland was at best an unpleasant one, and that if we delayed, 1000 to 60 were by no means extravagant odds that we might get no leave at all.
It was about a fortnight after this that, having returned to grimy old Lane’s, I received a characteristic letter from my old chum, George Hay. “Most of my time” (he wrote) “is spent in accompanying the old squire on his various peregrinations over the estate, and by pointing out various agricultural developments that were absolutely necessary, or structural alterations that would improve the holdings. He leads me to understand that my place was on the spot I would one day inherit, and the fitting moment would arrive after I got my company. ‘D— it, sir,’ he would continue, ‘in my time no eldest son remained longer than a year in the army unless he was prepared to pay £10,000 over regulation for the regiment as Cardigan did.’
“‘But in the infantry, sir,’ I suggested, ‘things are different. Promotion is slower, and I can’t help thinking that the bonds that unite officers to the regiment are stronger than is usually the case in the cavalry. But I see no prospect of my company till we are under orders for foreign service, and we shan’t be at the top of the roster for another two years at least.’