but a memory to her and you.. and to all our comrades of the old 23rd.'

His lips quivered and his eyes closed, as he said with something of his old pleasant smile,

'I am going to heaven, I hope, Harry—if I have not done much good in the world, I have not done much harm; and in Heaven I'll meet with more red coats, I believe, than black ones. . . . and tell her ... tell Winny-'

What I was to tell her I never learned; his voice died away, and he never spoke again; for just as the contest became fiercer between the French and the masses of Russians-temporarily released from the Redan or drawn from the city -his head fell over on one side, and he expired.

I closed his eyes, for there was yet time to do so.

Poor Phil Caradoc! I looked sadly for a minute on the pale and stiffening face of my old friend and jovial chum, and saw how fast the expression of bodily pain passed away from the whitening forehead. I could scarcely assure myself that he was indeed gone, and so suddenly; that his once merry eyes and laughing lips would open never again. Turning away, I prepared once more for the assault, and then, for the first time, I perceived Lieutenants Dyneley and Somerville of ours lying near him; the former mortally wounded and in great pain, the latter quite dead.

My soul was full of a keen longing for vengeance, to grapple with the foe once more, foot to foot and face to face.

The blood was fairly up in all our hearts; for the Russians had now relined their own breastworks, where a tall officer in a gray capote made himself very conspicuous by his example and exertions. He was at last daring enough to step over the rampart and tear down a

wooden gabion, to make a kind of extempore embrasure through which an additional field - piece might be run.

As you are so fond of pot-firing,' said Colonel Windham to the soldiers, with some irritation at the temporary repulse, 'why the deuce don't you shoot that Russian?'

On looking through my fieldglass, to my astonishment I discovered that he was Tolstoff.

Sergeant Rhuddlan of ours now levelled his rifle over the bank of earth which protected the parallel, took a steady aim, and fired.

Tolstoff threw up his arms wildly, and his sword glittered as it fell from his hand. He then wheeled round, and fell heavily backward into the ditch-which was twenty feet broad and ten feet deep-dead; at least, I never saw or heard of him again.

Just as a glow of fierce exultation, pardonable enough, perhaps, at such a time (and remembering all the circumstances under which this distinguished Muscovite and I had last met and parted), thrilled through me, I experienced a terrible shock-a shock that made me reel and shudder, with a sensation as if a hot iron had pierced my left arm above the elbow. It hung powerless by my side, and then I felt my own blood trickling heavily over the points of my fingers!

'Wounded! My God, hit at last!' was my first thought; and I lost much blood before I could get any one, in that vile hurly-burly, to tie my handkerchief as a temporary bandage round the limb to stanch the flow.

I was useless now, and worse than useless, as I was suffering greatly, but I could not leave the parallel for the hospital huts, and remained there nearly till dusk fell.

Before that, I had seen Caradoc interred between the gabions; and there he lay in his hastily scooped

grave, uncoffined and unknelled, his heart's dearest longings unfulfilled, his brightest hopes and keenest aspirations crushed out like his young life; and the evanescent picture, the poor photo of the girl he had loved in vain, buried with him ; and when poor Phil was being covered up I remembered his anecdote about the dead officer, and the letter that was replaced in his breast.

Well, my turn for such uncouth obsequies might come soon enough

now.

In the affair of the Redan, if I mistake not, 146 officers and men of ours, the Welsh Fusileers, were killed and wounded; and every other regiment suffered in the same proportion.

The attack was to be renewed at five in the morning by the Guards and Highlanders, under Lord Clyde of gallant memory, then Sir Colin Campbell; but on their approaching, it was found that the Russians had spiked their guns, and bolted by the bridge of boats, leaving Sebastopol one sheet of living fire.

Fort after fort was blown into the air, each with a shock as if the solid earth were being split asunder. The sky was filled with live shells, which burst there like thousands of scarlet rockets, and thus showers of iron fell in every direction. Columns of dark smoke, that seemed to prop heaven itself, rose above the city, while its defenders in thousands, without beat of drum or sound of trumpet, poured away by the bridge

of boats.

When the last fugitive had passed, the chains were cut, and then the mighty pontoon, a quarter of a mile in length, swung heavily over to the north side, when we were in full possession of Sebastopol !

CHAPTER LVI.

A SUNDAY MORNING IN THE
CRIMEA.

I MUST have dropped asleep of sheer weariness and loss of blood, when tottering to the rear; for on waking I found the moon shining, and myself lying not far from the fifth parallel, which was now occupied, like the rest of the trenches, by the kilted Highlanders, whose bare legs, and the word Egypt on their appointments, formed a double source of wonder to our Moslem allies, especially to the contingent that came from the Land of Bondage. These sturdy fellows were chatting, laughing, and smoking, or quietly sleeping and waiting for their turn of service against the Redan in the dark hours of the morning.

I had lain long in a kind of dreamy agony. Like many who were in the Redan and in the ditch around it, I had murmured 'water, water,' often and vainly. The loss of Estelle or of Valerie, for times there were when my mind wandered to the former now, the love of dear friends, the death of comrades, honour, glory, danger from pillaging Russians or Tartars, all emotions, in fact, were merged or swallowed up in the terrible agony I endured in my shattered arm, and the still more consuming craving for something wherewith to moisten my cracked lips and parched throat. Poor Phil Caradoc had perhaps endured this before me, while his

heart and soul were full of Winifred

Lloyd; but Phil, God rest him! was at peace now, and slept as sound in his uncouth grave as if laid under marble in Westminster Abbey.

In my uneasy slumber I had been conscious of this sensation of thirst, and had visions of champagne goblets, foaming and iced; of humble bitter beer and murmuring water;

of gurgling brooks that flowed over brown pebbles, and under longbladed grass and burdocks in leafy dingles; of Llyn Tegid deep and blue; of the marble fountain with the lilies and golden fish at Craigaderyn. Then with this idea the voice of Winifred Lloyd came pleasantly to my ear; her white fingers played with the sparkling water, she raised some to my lips, but the cup fell to pieces, and starting, I awoke to find a tall Highlander of the Black Watch bending over me, and on my imploring him to get me some water, he placed his wooden canteen to my lips, and I drank of the contents, weak rum-grog, greedily and thankfully.

It seemed strange to me that I should dream of Winifred there and then; but no doubt the last words of Caradoc had led me to think of her.

It is only when waking after long weariness of the body, and overtension of the nerves, the result of such keen excitement as we had undergone since yesterday morning, that the full extremity of exhaustion and fatigue can be felt, as I felt them then. Add to these, that my shattered arm had bled profusely, and was still undressed.

me.

Staggering up, I looked around

The moon was shining, and flakes of her silver light streamed through the now silent embrasures of the Redan, silent save for the groans of the dying within it. There and in the ditch the dead lay as thick as sheaves in a harvest-field

-as thick as the Greeks at Troy lay under the arrows of Apollo.

How many a man was lying there, mutilated almost out of the semblance of humanity, whose thoughts, when the death shot struck him down, or the sharp bayonet pierced him, had flashed home, quicker than the electric telegraph, yea, quicker than light, to his parents' hearth, to his lonely

wife, to the little cots where their children lay abed-little ones, the memory of whose waxen faces and pink hands then filled his heart. with tears; how many a resolution for prayer and repentance if spared by God; how many a pious invocation; how many a fierce resolution to meet the worst, and die like a man and a soldier, had gone up from that hell upon earth, the Redan-the fatal Redan, which we should never have attacked, but should have aided the French in the capture of the Malakoff, after which it must inevitably have fallen soon, if not at once!

Many of our officers were afterwards found therein, each with a hand clutching a dead Russian's throat, or coat, or belt, their fingers stiffened in death-man grasping man in a fierce and last embrace. Among others that stately and handsome fellow, Raymond Mostyn of the Rifles, and an officer of the Vladimir regiment were thus locked together, the same grape-shot having killed them both. Some of our slain soldiers were yet actually clinging to the parapet and slope of the glacis, as if still alive, thus showing the reluctance with which they had retired-the desperation with which they died.

In every imaginable position of agony, of distortion and bloody mutilation, they lay, heads crushed and faces battered, eyes starting from their sockets, and swollen tongues protruding; and on that terrible scene the pale moon, 'sweet regent of the sky,' the innocent queen of night, as another poet calls her, looked softly down in her glory, as the same moon in England far away was looking on the stubble-fields whence the golden grain had been gathered, on peaceful homesteads, old church steeples and quiet cottage roofs, on the ruddy furnaces of the Black country, on peace and plenty, and

where war was unknown, save by

name.

She glinted on broken and abandoned weapons; she silvered the upturned faces of the dead-kissing them, as it were, for many a loving one who should see them no more; and gemming as if with diamonds the dewy grass and the autumnal wild-flowers; and there too, amid that horrible débris, were the little birds-the goldfinch, the tit, and the sparrow-hopping and twittering about, too terrified to seek their nests, scared as they were by the uproar of the day that was past.

I felt sick at heart and crushed in spirit now.

In the immediate foreground the moonlight glinted on the tossing dark plumes, the picturesque costume, and bright bayonets of the Highlanders in the trenches. In the distance was the town; its ports, arsenals, barracks, theatres, palaces, churches, and streets sheeted with roaring flames, that lighted up all the roadstead, where, one after the other, the Russian ships were disappearing beneath the waves, in that lurid glare which tipped with a fiery gleam the white walls and spiked cannon of the now abandoned forts.

I began to creep back towards the camp in search of surgical aid, and on the way, came to a place where, with their uniforms off, their shirt-sleeves rolled up, their boxes of instruments open, lint and bandages ready, three officers of the medical staff were busy upon a group of wounded men, who sat or lay near, waiting their turn, some impatiently, some with passive endurance, but all more or less in pain, as their moans and sighs declared.

'Don't bother about that Zouave, Gage,' I heard one Esculapius say, as I came near, 'I have overhauled him already.'

'Is his wound mortal?' 'Yes-brain lacerated. By Jove! here is an officer of the 23rd!'

'Well, he must wait a little.' So I sighed, and seated myself on a stone, and clenched my teeth to control the agony I was enduring.

The men who lay about us, with pale wobegone visages and lacklustre eyes, belonged chiefly to the Light Division, but among them I saw, to my surprise, a Russian hussar lying dead, with the blood dry and crusted on his pale blue and yellow-braided dolman. How he came to be there, I had not the curiosity to inquire. A mere bundle of gory rags, he seemed; for a cannon-shot had doubled him up, and now his Tartar horse stood over him, eyeing him wildly, and sniffing as if in wonder about his bearded face and fallen jaw.

The Zouave referred to was a noisy and loquacious fellow, notwithstanding his perilous predicament. He had strayed hither somehow from the Malakoff, and was mortally wounded, as the surgeon said, and dying. A tiny plaster image of the blessed Virgin lay before him; he was praying intently at times, but being fatuous, he wildly and oddly mingled with his orisons the name of a certain Mademoiselle Aurélie, a fleuriste, with whom he imagined himself in the second gallery of the Théâtre Français, or supping at the Barrière de l'Etoile; anon he imagined they were on the Boulevards, or in a café chantant; and then as his mind-or what remained of itseemed to revert to the events of the day, he drew his 'cabbage-cutter,' as the French call their swordbayonet, and brandished it, crying,

'Cut and hew, strike, mes camarades frappez vite et frappez forte! Vive la France! Vive l'Empereur !'

This was the last effort; a gush of fresh blood poured into his eyes,

and the poor Zouave was soon cold and stiff.

In a kind of stupor I sat there and watched by moon and lantern light the hasty operations: bullets probed for and snipped out by forceps, while the patients writhed and yelled; legs and arms dressed or cut off like branches lopped from a tree, and chucked into a heap for interment. I shuddered with apprehensive foreboding of what might ensue when my own turn came, and heard, as in a dream, the three surgeons talking with the most placid coolness about their little bits of practice.

'Jones, please,' said one, a very young staff medico, 'will you kindly take off this fellow's leg for me? I have ripped up his trousers and applied the tourniquet-he is quite ready.'

'But must it come off?' asked Jones, who was patching up a bullet-hole with lint.

'Yes; gun-shot fracture of the knee-joint,-patella totally gone.'

'Why don't you do it yourself, my good fellow?' asked the third, who, with an ivory-handled saw between his teeth, was preparing to operate on the fore-arm of a 19th man, whose groans were terrible. 'Gage, did you never amputate ?'

'Never on the living subject.'
'On a dead one then, surely?'
'Often-of course.'

'By Jove, you can't begin too soon-so why not now?'

'I am too nervous-do it for me.' "In one minute; but only this once, remember. Now give me your knife for the flap; and look to that officer of the Welsh Fusileers-his left arm is wounded.’

So while Dr. Jones, whom the haggard eyes of the man whose limb was doomed, watched with a terrible expression of anxiety, applied himself to the task of amputation, the younger doctor, a hand fresh from London, came to me.

After ripping up the sleeve of my uniform, and having a brief examination, which caused me such bitter agony that I could no longer stand, but lay on the grass, he said,

'Sorry to tell you, that yours is a compound fracture of the most serious kind.'

'Is it reducible?' I asked in a low voice.

'No; I regret to say that your arm must come off.'

'My arm-must I lose it?' I asked, feeling keener anguish with the unwelcome announcement.

'Yes; and without delay,' he replied, stooping towards his instru

ment case.

'I cannot spare it-I must have some other-excuse me, sir-some older advice,' I exclaimed passionately.

'As you please, sir,' replied the staff-surgeon coolly; but we have no time to spare here, either for opposition or indecision.'

The other two glanced at my arm, poked it, felt it as if it had been that of a lay figure in a studio, and supported the opinion of their brother of the knife. But the prospect of being mutilated, armless, for life, and all the pleasures of which such a fate must deprive me, seemed so terrible, that I resolved to seek for other advice at the hospital tents, and towards them I took my way, enduring such pain of body and misery of mind that on reaching them I should have sunk, had brandy not been instantly given to me by an orderly.

It was Sunday morning now, and the gray light of the September dawn was stealing over the waters of the Euxine, and up the valley of Inkermann. The fragrant odour of the wild thyme came pleasantly on the breeze; but now the rain was falling heavily, as it generally does after an action-firing puts down the wind, and so the rain comes; but to me then it was like