Page:Notes on the Anti-Corn Law Struggle.djvu/50

 and the panther was prevented from doing further mischief.

In 1811 he joined the 14th Light Dragoons in Spain as lieutenant, and was present at the actions of Nivelle, Nive, Orthes, and Toulouse, for which he received the Peninsular War-medal with four clasps. During the campaign of 1814, he was taken off regimental duty and attached to the staff of General (afterwards Sir Henry) Fane, of whose kindness and ability he preserved a grateful recollection. "Some old Dragoons, discharged on eightpence a day," he writes in a passage which T quote from an Obituary Notice of him written by his second son. General Charles William Thompson, and printed in the Obituary Notices of the Royal Society, No. 116, 1869, "may remember that he was a careful leader of a patrol, a good looker-out on piquet, could feel a retiring enemy, and carry off a sentry for proof, as well as another, a great hater of punishment, and a man of very small baggage, consisting of something like a spare shirt and an Arabic grammar."

Captain Thompson—he was promoted at the peace of 1814—exchanged into the 17th Light Dragoons serving in India. In 1819 he accompanied Sir William Grant Keir as Arabic interpreter