Excerpt from Percy Blake, or the Young Rifleman, Vol. 1 of 3 I was born in a small country town, in the south of Ireland, which has furnished more officers to the army, than any place in the United Kingdom of thrice its importance. I leave it to casuists to determine whether this was owing to the proverbial pugnacity of the Tipperary boys, or to the idle and unoccupied life of the small gentry, whose family pride made them scorn that trade which was best calculated to repair their family indigence. Certain it is, however, that the soil of many lands has been moistened by the blood, or has witnessed the sufferings of many of my townsmen and school-fellows who began their career in life as I did myself, about the com mencement of that tremendous struggle, in which the genius and good-fortune of Napo leon sank, at length, under the wealth, the power, and the energies of Great Britain. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.