Page:The English Peasant.djvu/270

 advanced at one leap over the heads of thirty sergeants to be serjeant-major.

The day came at last when his regiment was to sail for Nova Scotia. To men like Cobbett such a voyage is the veritable discovery of a new world. Soon after his arrival the regiment was ordered to St John's, in the province of New Brunswick; and it was while here that he fell in love. It was, as will be supposed, in his own characteristic fashion. To begin with, it was love at first sight. He had not been in Anne Reid's company an hour before he had made up his mind. But nothing so enhanced his opinion of his own judgment as a trifling circumstance which happened shortly after. "It was my habit," he says, "when I had done my morning's writing, to go out at break of day to take a walk on a hill at the foot of which our barracks lay. In about three mornings after I had first seen her I had, by an invitation to breakfast with me, got up two young men to join me in my walk; and our road lay by the house of her father and mother. It was hardly light, but she was out on the snow, scrubbing out a washing tub. 'That's the girl for me,' said I when we had got out of her hearing."

With his usual positiveness and self-confidence he writes, "From the day that I first spoke to her I never had a thought of her ever being the wife of any other man, more than I had a thought of her being transformed into a chest of drawers; and I formed my resolution at once—to marry her as soon as we could get permission, and to get out of the army as soon as I could."

However, his fidelity was destined to a severe trial. The artillery, in which his sweetheart's father was a sergeant-major, was ordered back to England, while his own regiment was sent to Fredericton, a hundred miles up the river St John.

Rambling about the woods of New Brunswick, he lost his way. Night came on, but he could not sleep on account of the cold, and the noise of bears. There was a moon shining, and he wandered on until at last he came on a log hut. The master, a loyalist Yankee farmer, received him with the utmost cordiality. The enjoyment of a good bed and a sumptuous breakfast was intensified by the fact that the house was adorned by the presence