"Come on," he said, peevishly clutching me by the arm; "what do you want
dawdling? Are you a nursery-maid, that you must stare at those red-coated
butchers?" And a deep curse followed.
"What harm have they done you?"
"I should think I owed them turn enough."
"What?"
"They cut my father down at Sheffield,--perhaps with the very swords he
helped to make,--because he would not sit still and starve, and see us
starving around him, while those who fattened on the sweat of his brow, and
on those lungs of his, which the sword-grinding dust was eating out day by
day, were wantoning on venison and champagne. That's the harm they've done
me, my chap!"
"Poor fellows!--they only did as they were ordered, I suppose."
"And what business have they to let themselves be ordered? What right, I
say--what right has any free, reasonable soul on earth, to sell himself for
a shilling a day to murder any man, right or wrong--even his own brother
or his own father--just because such a whiskered, profligate jackanapes
as that officer, without learning, without any god except his own
looking-glass and his opera-dancer--a fellow who, just because he is born
a gentleman, is set to command grey-headed men before he can command his
own meanest passions.
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