But he would have seen her the next morning, if only to tell her something about the Alma and Inkermann.
And the next, if only to tell her how he was sent to India immediately after the fall of Sebastopol.
Two more would have been the least he could have allowed himself to give an account of the relief of Lucknow.
The Wedding Breakfast.
And nothing could have prevented the next being fully occupied by his inquiry whether she would share with him any future campaign that the wheel of fortune or the Emperor Napoleon might render necessary; and—receiving a satisfactory answer thereto.
P.S. Lady Morningthorpe insisted on being allowed to give the wedding-breakfast.
N.B. It is my private opinion that if such a campaign should take place, Frank will not fight any the worse for being married.
PASTIMES OF PEACE AN EXERCISE FOR WAR.
The rapid and healthy growth of the volunteer movement in our land bids fair to restore to us an institution from the decay of which we have long suffered. Play—honest, physical, hard play—has been, of late, far too much neglected by our adult and youthful population, and with the inevitable results. At thirty we are very apt to give up boating and cricketing, while a tramp over the brown stubbles after the partridges and a gallop over the breezy downs with the hounds, are luxuries obtainable but for a few months in the year, even when they come within the means of a working family man. To the vast majority they are, of course, unattainable, and to such, physical pastime, consequent upon the martial duties we have voluntarily undertaken, has become an admirable substitute for the physical play which we have given up from necessity or neglect. In our hearing the other day a barrister, of mature age and considerable practice, was dwelling, with unmistakable relish, upon the benefit he was deriving from the evening-drill to which he was subjected as a conscientious effective of one of the metropolitan rifle-corps. He had shouldered a rifle from a sense of duty, and already he was more than rewarded by his enjoyment of that hearty, physical play for which the healthy muscles never lose their relish.
Again, let us look at the physical pastime of those of us who were boys but yesterday. Of late years the business of life has increased immensely, while its recreation has been decreasing in an inverse ratio. The mind is taxed in a hundred ways unknown to and unthought of by our sires, and the strain is felt from the highest to the lowest worker in the land. The progress of the age has been everywhere to substitute mechanical for manual labour; and while an almost perfect system of locomotion compels us to dispense with pedestrian exercise, the wondrous development of machinery almost as completely supersedes manual exertion.
