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It was one of those night skirmishes or surprises that brought me promotion. For on the evening of December 10th our troop, being ordered out to beat up the neighbourhood of Odiham, on the way fell in with a half-squadron of the Lord Crawford’s cuirassiers, and in the loose pistol-firing we took five prisoners and lost our cornet, Master John Ingoldby. The next day we rested; and that morning, as I sat on a rusty harrow by the forge close beside Farnham Church and watched the farrier roughing my horse, our Sergeant-Major Le Gaye, a Walloon, came up to me and desired me to attend on Colonel Stuckey, who presently and with many kind expressions told me that I was chosen to fill the room of the dead cornet.

Now this was flattering: and you may think with what elation of mind I took it, being eager and young (in fact, scarce turned twenty). But almost it jumped beyond my ambitions at the time. I was one of five sergeants of the troop, the unripest among them and already accounted lucky. I knew well that this advancement had passed them and reached me less for my deserving than because our colonel preferred to have his commands carried by men of decent birth. I knew the whole army to be sore already over fifty like promotions, and foresaw grumbling.

‘I bear ye no malice’–this was the way that Roger Inch took it, our senior sergeant. ‘But you’ll allow ’tis disheartening to be set aside for a lawyer-fellow that, a year ago, had never groomed horse-hair but on his own wig.’ And so–but less kindly–the rest of my fellow-sergeants expressed themselves.

None the less they were ready enough, that evening, to join in drinking to my new honours. The place was the Bear Inn, in Farnham; the liquor, warmed ale; and I paid the scot. Towards midnight Sergeant Inch had so far forgot his rancour as to strike up his song of Robin and the Night Owl–‘Robin,’ I should explain, being the Earl of Essex, and the ‘Night Owl’ our own general, so nicknamed for his activities after dark.

We broke no regulations by this revelry, being allowed by custom, after a night in saddle, to spend the next as we chose, provided that we kept to quarters. For me, though I had done better in bed, snatching a little sleep, the time was past for seeking it. A picket of ours had been flung out to westward of the town, on the Alton Road, and at twelve o’clock I was due to relieve it. So I pushed the drink around, and felt their grudge against me lessening while Sergeant Inch sang,–

‘Robin’s asleep, for Robin is nice;
Robin has delicate habits;
But “Whoo!” says the gray Night Owl–once, twice,
And three times “Whoo!” for the little shy mice,
The mice and the rats and the rabbits,
“Who-oo!”‘

At the close of every verse he mimicked an owl’s call to the life– having in his young days been a verderer of the New Forest, on the edge of Bradley Plain; and at the end of his third verse, in the middle of a hoot, was answered by a trumpet not far away upon the road to Alton.

At the sound of it we sprang up, all of us, and two or three ran out into the street: for the beating up of quarters had become a bad habit with the two armies, useless as the most of us thought it. The night outside was freezing villainously: it struck chill into me after the hot room and the ale-drinking. The moon, as I remember, was high, shedding a soft foggy light down the roadway: and there, by the inn doorway, I stood for a minute or two, with my hand on my sword, peering and listening. To right and left, and from behind me, came sounds of men moving in their billets to the alarm and waiting, as I was waiting. But no noise of attack followed the first summons; and by-and-by I drew back as a brisk footfall broke the hush and came hurrying down to the doorway of the Bear, where it halted.