Captain Hamilton of the Guards

by John Byers

My first estimation of Captain Hamilton voted him a gallant gentleman. But I was only a young, enthusiastic chap from a quiet Massachusetts town, seeing the sights in London, and my opinion was but the hastily formed judgment of a boy—hastily formed and hastily changed, as the reader will see.

I was going it alone, as the saying has it. My dear old uncle, whose protégé I was, had said to me:

“Go and visit England and the Continent, my boy. You have a zest for traveling. Push through alone; the experience will do you good; nothing like it for a young fellow fresh from college. You will come back all the better for the contact.”

So he put money in my purse, forwarded to a London banker a handsome reserve find for me, and bade me go and enjoy myself.

I made Captain Hamilton’s acquaintance during the second week of my stay in London. I knew nobody there. During the evenings, after my return from sight-seeing, I used to saunter about through the reading-room and billiard-room of the hotel trying to kill the time until bed hour. Naturally enough I had many odd bits of conversation with different people. I was proud of telling everyone who  talked with me that  I was an American from the North—our civil war was about closing then—and so I had a part in not a few hot arguments; for the tide of sympathy was still setting strongly in favor of the South. Any one who espoused my cause won my friendship immediately. Among the number who indorsed me, and, to my mind the best of them all, was Captain Hamilton.

He stood by me right cleverly one evening, in what was almost a quarrel with a stout little Liverpool shipping merchant; and he handled my case so well that my heart overflowed with gratitude for him.

“I am a military man myself, sir… Read More