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JACK O'FLANAGAN.

"How stands the glass around!—

For shame!-you take no care, my boys

How stands the glass around,

Let mirth and wine abound!"

Old Song.

It was in the British camp, before St Sebastian, that I first became acquainted with Lieutenant John O'Flanagan, generally known among the officers and men of his regiment by the friendly and familiar abbreviation of Jack.

To show the reader what manner of man he was would require the aid of the pencil as well as of the pen, which latter I am well aware is of itself quite inadequate to the work of delineation.

I

Jack was a native of the south of Ireland, somewhat above the middle-size, and apparently not under middle-age; or, if he really was as young as he professed to be, Toil had forged the handwriting of Time with such felicity, that no one could have suspected the deceit; in other words, the crow's-foot had made a deep impression at the corner of each eye, and numerous wrinkles meandered over his brow.

The sufferings of the Peninsular Campaigns (in all of which he had served) had also given him something of a worn-out appearance, and his cheek had exchanged the hue of the rose for that of virgin-gold.

In the construction of his eyes Nature had deviated from her general plan,-they might indeed well be said to be matchless, inasmuch as they bore no kind of resemblance to each other, one of them squinting in a most unusual degree, and the other having what is called a cast. The former, with a bewildering dubiety of direction, seemed to ogle two or three objects at once; while the latter, which occupied a situation about half

an inch higher in the face, like a jealous guardian, seemed to keep a watchful outlook upon the little leering libertine below, lest it should wander away after the dark-eyed Donnas of the land.

Collapsed cheeks and a mouth having a leaning to one side of his face formed its remaining peculiarities; and his cravat, or stock, he wore so loose as to afford a distinct view of a long scraggy neck rising from a narrow pedestal of shoulders, one of which ambitiously overtopped the other, and terminated in a sharp knob, whereon his epaulet, like the dove of the ark, finding no resting-place, slid from its bony pinnacle, and hung down upon his back in drooping repose; and his cap he wore so high upon his brow, that the back part of it rested under the neck of his coat. His figure altogether was very spare, and looked as if it had been flattened by pressure. His legs, or rather walking-sticks, (for they had long been deserted by their calves,) were of the smallest upon which warrior ever toddled forth to battle; and Jack, with an infatuation common to men of his make, constantly exposed them

in tights. They were assisted, however, in carrying him on by the co-operation of his arms, and a general auxiliary wriggle of his whole body.

His accent was strongly Hibernian, and his patriotism was ardent as it was circumscribed, its focus being the city of Limerick, and the utmost limits of its genial glow extending only over the southern provinces of Ireland,the northern portion of the island being, in his opinion, the very Botany Bay of Europe.

During the whole of the Peninsular Campaigns, the toils of which Jack had suffered and survived, he had lived chiefly on suction; and, in the absence of his favourite national beverage potheen, had solaced himself with rum and brandy, in which articles of daily consumption most of his cash was liquidated. In the bottle he found a consoling friend, a sweet oblivious antidote to the toils of war; and those periods during which the rigid duties of a soldier in camp denied convivial indulgences he considered as so many dreary blanks in existence.

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