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the last few days from my old wound, and while I was ill I so thought of· " and here he had come to the bottom of his page, and Jessy in her eagerness, poor girl, to turn the leaf over, was longer about it than usual, for some strange gleam of hope warmed her mind,-" home and my dear mother's kindness in my old illness,"—and so it went on to the end.

It had dropped from Jessy's hand, and fallen on the ground, while her head had sunk against the back of the arm chair; her two hands were clasped; her eyes had wandered to the window,-to the old grey church tower, which was looking in at her through the trees so kindly; and just then it chimed with its beautiful bells ten o'clock. Jessy knew the sound so well. As a little girl she used to fancy they said on Sunday mornings, "Do come to church; Do come to church;" and at night, as she grew older, they seemed to sound so solemn and melancholy as she lay awake, as if they said in their clear, unearthly tones, "Here lie the dead; Here lie the dead." And when she sat in her little room looking musingly out of window, or in that chair of hers reading for the long hours together, the grey tower seemed to look in at her and sing its fitting tune, "The LORD bless you. The LORD bless you." And now the chimes sung again their quiet tune to her poor, saddened heart, "Trust ye not in a friend, put ye not confidence in a guide; who is a GOD like unto Thee, Who will cast all our sins into the depths of the sea ?"

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CHAPTER XV.

BALAKLAVA.

BUT we must return to Leonard. Having escaped from his captors he was not very long in reaching the rear of the retreating army, which was by this time fast approaching the deep valley of Inkerman, through which the river Tchernaya runs, now famous for the awful battle fought in its vicinity, and as the boundary to many a winter's walk of our officers in the Crimea. When Leonard overtook the rear of the army, having passed through the French, he found the English encamping after a weary march on the heights above the river. The long advance over a surface of chalk, covered thinly with grass, with the atmosphere laden with clouds of dry dust, had made the army glad of repose. Weary with his ride, and faint both from the pain of his wound and continual loss of blood, Leonard spent but a restless night under the tent of a brother officer, constantly watching the red glare on the sky above the heights which they had passed, on which Mackenzie's farm stood, and which marked the site occupied by the French troops. As he lay, restless on his bed, such as it was, he had time to reflect on the peculiarity of his position. War, which hitherto had been to him but like a dream of the Crusades, or the almost equally romantic period of the first Napoleon, had now burst upon him in its stern reality; and almost before he had had time to reflect upon it, some of its leading incidents were things of the past. Events had transpired which would glow upon the

page of history with that uncertain light which gives them half their charm, and all their unreality. Tothe reader of history, or of "the Times," the circumstances through which Leonard had passed in the last week were such as to make every actor in them appear as heroes and demigods; and to lead those who read of them to find it difficult not to divest their impressions of them as of men wearing ordinary coats and trowsers. To such persons the very faces of the soldiers assume a new aspect, and the colour or the line on the countenance which four months ago had marked the barrack soldier as a drunkard or a fool, no longer exist in the impressions of the same man in the Crimea. Each regiment presents embodiments in eye, brow, and bearing, of the various virtues in Aristotle's ethics, ranging from "the magnanimous man" down to him that possessed that "inexpressible virtue which has something to do with shame." And yet our "magnanimous man" had six months before beaten his wife, and the other had shown no very inexpressible shame in being drunk; but we find it very difficult to take this commonplace view of soldiers who fight battles, and it is as well if we can let them be heroes; only this sort of thing is sure to occur-an Alma soldier with his arm in a sling walks through your village six months after the battle, you take off your hat to him, make way for him, bow or ask with reverential air about the details of the battle, as if you were Telemachus and he Ulysses, and Penelope with all the suitors were walking somewhere behind. The battle seems to have made no impression whatever upon him; if he does tell you anything about it, it is a canting epitome which he has

learnt from some one who was not in the battle, and he ends by asking you for sixpence to drink your health; you are astounded and take him for an impostor, simply because you over-estimated the relation of soldiers to their battles.

A man gets a very imperfect impression, and a very uneasy one, of light, by looking straight at the sun; he gets a much more glorious one by looking at the horizon just after the sun has set; there is something singularly dazzling and perplexing in the idea of a battle to a man who is in it. We might as well expect to find in every cotton-spinner at Manchester the same conscious romance about his factory, as you have about "Mary Barton;" or that every innkeeper feels she is "Meg Dodds."

almost a Julius

He had left his

Such were the feelings which were perplexing Leonard's mind on the night of the 26th. All the features which had made the military portions of Arnold's Rome, Grote's battle of Marathon, Alison's Europe, Southey's Peninsula, or Old Mortality, interesting, through the last five years of his boyish life had now been incidents in which he had been an actor. He had been a Charles O'Malley, a Henry Morton, Cæsar, and yet he had not known it. home amidst the blessings of countrymen, he had sailed defiantly on the Black Sea, he had been one of an army invading Russia, he had fought a desperate battle, and been as good as any hero there, he had been wounded, a captive, and escaped, and what could a soldier do more? Yet he had no such impressions about the circumstances or himself which he had had about the actors on the stages above referred to. But so it ever

is, acts and the impressions which they make are two different things. We cannot make impressions any more than we can make wheat, but when they do come they are glorious things. If we try to force them they will produce a very poor crop; and if we do not find them we must not be disappointed.

On the 27th the army marched four miles, but trouble had begun already. Exhausted with a long march, men dropped and slipped out of the ranks, and expired on the chalky downs in the agonies of cholera under the very eyes of their advancing comrades. About noon the first division halted at the mouth of a great chasm formed by two slopes, up each of which the brigades of the light division advanced. Leonard was with the troops which were moving through the gorge. A shell whizzing over the hill and bursting not far from him, the sounds of guns at sea, the continued firing from the heights above, and the clouds of dust which rose on the horizon showed that Balaklava might offer some resistance. But it yielded without bloodshed, and the advance of a white flag announced the circumstance that the famous flank march from the north to the south side of Sebastopol had been effected without placing the army in the perilous position of having no head-quarters. From the gorge above described a valley of a mile long led down to Balaklava, the sides of which were perfectly clothed with vine trees, apples, plums, pumpkins, and cabbages, of the latter of which as the "Times" told us, the soldiers ate plentifully. A small stream wound its way through the valley, along which clusters of trees offered a pleasing shade. To those who could have gained a bird's-eye view of it the

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