"Poor fellows!--they only did as they were ordered, I suppose."
"And what business have they to let themselves be ordered? What right, I say--what right has any free, reasonable soul on earth, to sell himself for a shilling a day to murder any man, right or wrong--even his own brother or his own father--just because such a whiskered, profligate jackanapes as that officer, without learning, without any god except his own looking-glass and his opera-dancer--a fellow who, just because he is born a gentleman, is set to command grey-headed men before he can command his own meanest passions. Good heavens! that the lives of free men should be entrusted to such a stuffed cockatoo; and that free men should be such traitors to their country, traitors to their own flesh and blood, as to sell themselves, for a shilling a day and the smirks of the nursery-maids, to do that fellow's bidding!"
"What are you a-grumbling here about, my man?--gotten the cholera?" asked one of the dragoons, a huge, stupid-looking lad.
"About you, you young long-legged cut-throat," answered Crossthwaite, "and all your crew of traitors."
"Help, help, coomrades o' mine!" quoth the dragoon, bursting with laughter; "I'm gaun be moorthered wi' a little booy that's gane mad, and toorned Chartist."
I dragged Crossthwaite off; for what was jest to the soldiers, I saw, by his face, was fierce enough earnest to him. We walked on a little, in silence.
"Now," I said, "that was a good-natured fellow enough, though he was a soldier. You and he might have cracked many a joke together, if you did but understand each other;--and he was a countryman of yours, too."
"I may crack something else besides jokes with him some day," answered he, moodily.
"'Pon my word, you must take care how you do it. He is as big as four of us."
"That vile aristocrat, the old Italian poet--what's his name?--Ariosto--ay!--he knew which quarter the wind was making for, when he said that fire-arms would be the end of all your old knights and gentlemen in armour, that hewed down unarmed innocents as if they had been sheep. Gunpowder is your true leveller--dash physical strength! A boy's a man with a musket in his hand, my chap!"
"God forbid," I said, "that I should ever be made a man of in that way, or you either. I do not think we are quite big enough to make fighters; and if we were, what have we got to fight about?"