The Child of Waterloo, or, The Horrors of the Battle-Field — page 232: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

THE CHILD OF WATERLOO. 229 ‘¢ However, every man to his liking, as the ould woman said when she kissed the cow. If you ain’t enough of a Christian to say ‘Good-night,’ keep it to yourself, and the divil go lucky with you. A bad night to you, if vou like that better.” Having delivered himself of this speech, Rafferty closed his eyes, and with a facility which was the effect of long habit, dur- ing the campaigns on the continent in which he had been en- gaged, where it came very desirable to catch a little sleep, with- out any cojyuetting with it, when it could be got, he was off in a moment or two. How long he slept Rafferty had no means of calculating. All he knew was that something awakened him, and that when he opened his eyes, which he did without mov- ing, he tound that‘the gray light of early morning was in the room. He lay with his back toward the other bed; but immediately facing him was a dressing-glass, in which he saw it clearly re- flected. As he looked—and surely a watchful Providence must have broken his slumbers at that moment—he saw the curtains of the other bed, as they were reflected in the glass, slowly opened. A hand appeared grasping a long murderous-looking knife, then a foot came out, and finally the whole figure of a man, partially attired, crept from the bed on to the floor, and began to come cautiously toward the bed on which Rafferty slept. He evidently had not the least idea that the looking-glass was betraying him, for he kept his eyes fixed upon Rafferty, whom no doubt he considered to be a perfectly easy prey. A second glance told Rafferty not only his danger, but from whom it arose. The man in the same room, with whom he had slept some hours, was no other than the mendicant—the very man whom he most wished to find, and who, doubtless, knowing him, Rafferty, had now determined upon taking his life, as the surest way of escaping from him, as wellas for vengeance. Had Rafferty slept but for another five minutes, his doom in this world would have been sealed. | ‘Fair and easy,” thought Rafferty, who was too old a cam- paigner to be flurried; ‘‘fair and easy. That’s it, is it? Come on, my darling.” Step by step the fellow came, and Rafferty gradually freed his feet from any entanglements among the clothing as he did so. With a calmness that few men, under such trying circum- stances, would have been equal to, he waited until two steps more would have brought the fellow sufficiently close to him to inflict the blow that, no doubt, from the hand of that practiced assassin, would have been almost immediately fatal. Then, as suddenly as if be had been impelled by some mechanical con-: trivances of great propulsive power, he sprung from the bed on the opposite side to that on which was the assassin. This movement of Rafferty was so utterly unexpected on the part of the mendicant, who no doubt thought him profoundly sleeping, that on the impulse of the moment he uttered a cry of espair, and then a pillow, thrown by Rafferty, came with such a dab in his face that it nearly blinded him. ** Whack, filliloo!” said Rafferty, as he ran round the bed, comicbooks. com