And I remembered the days when I wore the
coarse but honourable coat of a soldier; and remembered further
back how many of the noble, the fair, and the gracious had taken a
delight to tend my childhood. . . . But I must not recall these
tender and sorrowful memories twice; their place is further on, and
I am now upon another business. The perfidy of the Britannic
Government stood nowhere more openly confessed than in one
particular of our discipline: that we were shaved twice in the
week. To a man who has loved all his life to be fresh shaven, can
a more irritating indignity be devised? Monday and Thursday were
the days. Take the Thursday, and conceive the picture I must
present by Sunday evening! And Saturday, which was almost as bad,
was the great day for visitors.
Those who came to our market were of all qualities, men and women,
the lean and the stout, the plain and the fairly pretty. Sure, if
people at all understood the power of beauty, there would be no
prayers addressed except to Venus; and the mere privilege of
beholding a comely woman is worth paying for. Our visitors, upon
the whole, were not much to boast of; and yet, sitting in a corner
and very much ashamed of myself and my absurd appearance, I have
again and again tasted the finest, the rarest, and the most
ethereal pleasures in a glance of an eye that I should never see
again--and never wanted to.
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