Over the Border (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAP. III.?MUFFLED DRUMS. mHERE is something very sad in a soldier's funeral, at all times. When they buried the good old Colonel the next day?for in that tropical country the beloved dust and ashes cannot be kept in our sight for more than a few brief hours?there was all the pomp and circumstance of glorious war. There were the files of foot soldiers, and artillery with their imposing gun-carriages, and startlingly- brilliant native cavalry. Very far away from all his own kith and kin they laid him to rest. His ancestry were from the North. Many a Lee, in the good old times when men had but little regard to meum and tuum, had made moonlight forages into the wild Border- country, and ridden, lance in hand, behind weary cattle that had certainly not fallen to their lot over- honestly. The Lees of a later generation had been of an honester, perhaps of a more politic breed. They allowed their neighbours' steers and c stots to remain at peace. They fell into ways of commerce and prosperity, and were as ready as their neighbours to allow that honesty is the best policy. But something of the old Scottish clanship lingered with them, even when the head of the house lived in smoky London. And Colonel Lee, by education an Englishman, cherished an intense love of the fair North Country, whence his forbears had come. His mother had been one of the Homes of Burnside. So, when he was laid to sleep, with the crack of musketry thundering over him, and the rattle of the old familiar steel sounding close to his resting-place, there was nothing to be greatly wondered at in his choosing, as guardian and best friend to his child, his dear friend and cousin, Magdalen Lyndsay. There were great folk, nearer kith and kin to the Lees, who would, perhaps, have accepted the trust; for...