3-070-874 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

The Piping Times of Peace, 1881. 'The old soldier of the French wars, now sitting in his rustic garden at home, and playing a tune on the clarionet, to the entertainment of the listening girls behind the fence, is surely an agreeable representative of innocent repose from the toils and perils of grim-visaged war...there is such a quaint old-fashioned air of the last century about this kind old fellow, and his uniform...is of the same antiquated pattern. It would be pleasant to sit with him an hour or two; and, when he has performed all he knows upon the musical instrument that yields a customary solace of his evening leisure, to let him talk of campaigns and sieges in different foreign parts, where "Brown Bess," with the bayonet stuck in her muzzle, followed up the shower of hand-grenades to the discomforture of a host of Frenchmen and Spaniards lining the hostile rampart - or where, on the sultry plains of India, in the early days of British conquest there, myriads of dusky warriors, the chivalry of the Mogul or Mahratta Empire, were put to flight by a small band of disciplined English soldiers. We prefer, nevertheless, to live in the "piping times of peace," and to leave, far off in the past, those tales of military glory'. From "Illustrated London News", 1881.