The Militiaman at Home and Abroad Author:Emeritus Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. I DO not ask the reader's imagination to keep pace with me through the day by day moil and toil of a three weeks' training; it would be too cruel... more » a handling of it; but let him suppose the training over, and the men dispersed, and set himself by me in the halls of my ancestors, while, in elbow chair, before a blazing fire, with a flask of sherris, from number one bin, I review the memories of the past. But I must have no questions asked, for I have no voice to answer with, nor have any others of my gallant corps. I could shriek out a word of command, in a way of my own, but as for my private-life voice, the last I heard of it was at the Golden Lion, just before the fogs came on. Snow, hail, rain, and wind, have been keeping every sensible man on his hearth-rug since my departure ; and the borough of Dulminster being about ten degrees colder than any other spot in the THE REVIEW. 15 county, let the cozy stay-at-home multiply the outside miseries by ten, and find ours. Don't fancy that we have looked at them through the window. Neither hail, rain, nor snow, has kept man or officer from the drill-ground, and the result has beat anything we could have dreamed of. Our fight with the elements and rudiments closed in triumph ; for the general of the district, a veteran who knows, perhaps, more of what a soldier ought to be than any other man in England, came over and inspected us, and told us he never would have believed what he had heard of our progress, if he had not seen it with his own eyes. Now, the general is known to be no humbug, and we feel that he meant what he said. The ground, on the day of review, was covered with snow, but the men were as steady as rocks, and in their formations of four deep deployed from column into line, and formed square fro...« less