And I must tell you--in the sick ward I saw a young man, fair-curled, broad-chested, whose face seemed familiar. He was with Captain Cleather at the Aldershot Gym., fell, and is "going home"--slowly, and with every comfort and kindness about him, but of spinal paralysis. It _did_ seem hard lines! He was at the Amesbury March Past, and we had a long chat about it.
I cannot tell you how it pleases me that you liked the bit about Aldershot in "Lætus." I hope that it must have _grated_ very much if I had done it badly or out of taste, on any one who knows it as well as you do; and that its moving your sympathies does mean that I have done it pretty well. I cannot tell you the pains I expended on it! All those sentences about the Camp were written in scraps and corrected for sense and euphony, etc., etc., bit by bit, like "Jackanapes"!!! Did I tell you about "Tuck of Drum"? Several people who saw the proof, pitched into me, "Never heard of such an expression." I was convinced I knew it, and as I said, as a _poetical_ phrase; but I could not charge my memory with the quotation: and people exasperated me by regarding it as "camp slang." I got Miss S. to look in her _Shakespeare's Concordance_, but in vain, and she wrote severely, "My Major lifts his eyebrows at the term." I was in despair, but I sent the proof back, trusting to my instincts, and sent a postcard to Dr. Littledale, and got a post-card back by return--"Scott"--"Rokeby."
"With burnished brand and musketoon, So gallantly you come, I rede you for a bold dragoon, That lists the tuck of drum."-- "I list no more the tuck of drum, No more the trumpet hear; But when the beetle sounds his hum, My comrades take the spear."
And I copied this on to another postcard and added, _Tell your Major!_ and despatched it to Miss S.! She said, "You _did_ Cockadoodle!"--
But isn't it _exquisite_? _What_ a creature Scott was! Could words, could a long romance, give one a finer picture of the ex-soldier turned "Gentleman of the Road"? The touch of regret--"I list no more the tuck of drum," and the soldierly necessity for a "call"--and then _such_ a call!
I hope you will like the tale as a whole. It has been long in my head.
Oh! how funny Grossmith was! Yesterday I was at the Matinée for the Dramatic School, and he did a "Humorous Sketch" about Music, when he said with care-carked brows that there was only one man's music that _thoroughly_ satisfied him (after touching on the various schools!)--and added--"my own." It was inexpressibly funny. His "Amateur Composer" would have made you die!