THE STAFF OFFICER; OR, 67.196 THE SOLDIER OF FORTUNE. BOSTON LIBRARY A TALE OF REAL LIFE. BY. OLIVER MOORE. "The eb of our life is of a mingled yarn; good and ill together. Our vir. IN TWO VOLUMES. VOL. I. 2 PHILADELPHIA: E. L. CAREY & A. HART.-CHESNUT STREET. BOSTON: ALLEN & TICKNOR. THE STAFF OFFICER; OR, THE SOLDIER OF FORTUNE. CHAPTER I. "I ran it through, Even from my boyish days!" A MAN's actions during the first years of his life are so little dependent on himself, that he can neither claim much merit for any virtue they exhibit, nor incur great blame for their folly. The good and the evil of our childhood properly belong to the parent or guardian whose authority we are bound to respect, and whose example we are taught to imitate. From my fifth year to the age of eight, I was doomed to endure the horrors of a preparatory school, kept by a prim old maid, under the discipline of whose thimble finger my head smarted ten times a day for alleged stupidity. But at that joyous stage of life, being released from the petticoat, I was entered on the roll of junior boys at a large academy near Trinity College, Dublin, where my two senior brothers had already been established upwards of two years. The elder was from my earliest recollections an eccentric boy, reserved even to bashfulness in manner; cold, formal, and pedantic in address; embarrassed, if not awkward, in carriage: although with a personal appearance every way prepossessing, he seldom made his way in company; tormented with morbid sensitiveness of feeling, which formed the great drawback on his youthful pleasures, he was perpetually fancying some slight or neglect, where none was ever contemplated; his noble sense of justice in all his school-boy transactions, his inflexible fidelity to truth, even under the terrors of that punishment which was ever sure to follow the avowal of any act of insubordination or misconduet, had much endeared him to the regard of |