Footnotes:
[1] So admirable are the performances of these watches, which will stand in any climate, that I repeatedly heard poor Macgillicuddy relate the following fact. The hours, as it is known, count in Italy from one to twenty-four: The day Mac landed at Naples his repeater rung the Italian hours, from one to twenty-four; as soon as he crossed the Alps it only sounded as usual.—G. O’G. G.
[2] In my affair with Macgillicuddy, I was fool enough to go out with small swords:- miserable weapons, only fit for tailors.—G. O’G. G.
[3] The Major certainly offered to leave an old snuff-box at Mr. Cunningham’s office; but it contained no extract from a newspaper, and does not quite prove that he killed a rhinoceros and stormed fourteen entrenchments at the siege of Allyghur.
[4] The double-jointed camel of Bactria, which the classic reader may recollect is mentioned by Suidas (in his Commentary on the Flight of Darius), is so called by the Mahrattas.
[5] There is some trifling inconsistency on the Major’s part. Shah Allum was notoriously blind: how, then, could he have seen Gahagan? The thing is manifestly impossible.
[6] I do not wish to brag of my style of writing, or to pretend that my genius as a writer has not been equalled in former times; but if, in the works of Byron, Scott, Goethe, or Victor Hugo, the reader can find a more beautiful sentence than the above, I will be obliged to him, that is all—I simply say, I will be obliged to him.—G. O’G. G., M.H.E.I.C.S., C.I.H.A.
[7] The Major has put the most approved language into the mouths of his Indian characters. Bismillah, Barikallah, and so on, according to the novelists, form the very essence of Eastern conversation.