long advancing lines of the British soldiery,—the Highlanders and the Guards,―must have presented a striking spectacle; and when, added to this, the ships of our fleet ranged themselves side by side close to the shore, the magnificent form of the "Agamemnon" towering above them all, the ancestral pride of the British power must have appeared an invincible reality.

Outside the guardroom the garrison were assembled around the old commander, whose dignity of manner in surrendering his sword gained a deep feeling of respect from our men. Behind the town the hills slope very steeply towards Sebastopol, and are crowned by walls and towers.

Such was the place into which the British army entered, to be so celebrated in the military annals of our country; famous as Capua or as Moscow. A name to be connected in the mind of our army and the nation, with the associations of a cemetery or a charnel-house, while time has yet to show what new circumstances are to be added to the distressing recollections. Come what may, no progress of the tide of advancing time can eradicate from the record of history the impressions which will encircle round the description of Balaklava. A gallant army rotting away before the warm blast of disease, or paralysed by the strokes of the inclement and wintry wind, while a powerful enemy resisting every effort at successful assault, stood on the beleaguered wall like a terrible magician waving the fatal wand of misfortune and disaster over the helpless masses; stultifying the precipitate assertions of the English public, and baffling the expectations of attentive Europe.

CHAPTER XVI.

RAYMOND.

BUT it is time we return to Sebastopol, to see what was transpiring there. Our friends had met with kind treatment on all hands after entering the town; so much so, that their impressions of the Russians were completely altered. For not only were they treated without the least approach to cruelty or severity; but they received an attention, and courtesy on all hands, which surprised them much. Mr. Randall was conducted to a house with Raymond in the centre of the city, where, owing to the wounded and precarious state of his charge, he was told he should remain. He received the promise with gratitude. His host was a Russian of some importance, as it appeared, in the town, whose intelligence and good humour gained quickly on Mr. Randall. A room was assigned to himself and his charge, which while it secured their captivity, was as far as might be beyond the reach of danger. That danger was soon made apparently imminent enough. It was only shortly after they had taken up their abode in the house that Mr. Randall had been watching from the window the various groups and features of the city, when his attention was drawn towards a number of people who appeared in conversation at the corner of the street.

The company which Mr. Randall had been watching was composed of men, women, and children, some of whom wore the costume of Russia, and some the winter

dress of the Tartar inhabitant of the Crimea. The sun was shining brightly down upon them and the surrounding buildings, while the ever blue line of the sea was discernible at many points. By the movements of outstretched arms and earnest gesticulations on the part of those who formed the group, Mr. Randall gathered that they were discussing the position of the allied armies. A high interest and excitement, rather than any approach to the feelings of alarm or apprehension marked their manner and appearance. A youth darting suddenly across the street seemed to bring intelligence of more than common interest. As Mr. Randall apprehended, it was of the arrival of the British army at Balaklava, which by more than one unmistakeable sign had been known in the town. At this moment, a whizzing sound in the air startled the figures of the group and Mr. Randall; and a shell whizzing through the air, burst in the midst of the unfortunate company. The effect was fearful and instantaneous. Three were stretched instantly in death, and others fearfully lacerated by the fragments, groaned for help on the spot where they had been talking with so much vivacity; others were scared away.

The awful change created by the deadly missile made the clergyman shudder. "Such then," said he to himself, "is a unit of the thousand messengers of death which are to change joy into anguish, and hope into despair. God Almighty grant us peace! Oh how little those who long inwardly and devoutly for war for the sake of its excitement and its passing interest, imagine the stern and dreadful reality of anguish like

this! War is indeed the scourge of GOD. How blessed will heaven be where it will be heard no more!"

By this time several persons had gathered round the wretched sufferers, and bore them to a hospital of large dimensions, which stood near, and which was afterwards doomed to be the scene of so dreadful an event. But two more shells whizzing through the air and bursting in the street from the English fleet, scattering terror and destruction around, soon left the street destitute of passengers, and induced Mr. Randall to repair to the bedside of his patient.

Edward Randall, a passage in whose evidently chequered life we have given here, was born of wealthy parents. He was brought up by an indulgent mother, and a father who neglected everything for the sake of avarice, and was willing to forego for his only son all moral or religious care, for the sake of leaving him a few additional thousands in his posthumous fortune.

Edward was never sent to school, but after having been educated by a private tutor at home, was sent to Christ Church in Oxford. Possessed of large means and the main inheritor of an ample fortune; with a person prepossessing, and mental powers of no ordinary kind, he was quickly courted by men of fashion and of rank. And though he had the ambition and the moral energy to desire to use his powers with success, he gave as much heed to the calls and claims of society as to those of the midnight lamp.

At Oxford, Edward Randall fell into a set, whose refinement suited his taste, but whose dissipation and extravagance soon led him to the edge of ruin. But they were not men of openly abandoned lives; and refinement ever tends to take off more than half of the apparent wickedness of sin. A slightly philosophic tendency in the thoughts and pursuits of this set, made Randall believe that on the whole and in the long run, they were thoroughly good fellows. A poetical tone of voice and a recognition of the brevity of time, or the uncertainty of life, are sufficient passports for multitudes into the society of the good and the intelligent.

It was the misfortune of young Randall in this set to fall across a companion of the name of Fitzgerald, all of whose pursuits and tastes were like his own. Every loose and lax tendency in Randall was fostered by his friend; and the gaming-table and the extravagant and the sumptuous dinner-party ever found them colleagues.

In an unhappy day Randall went home to spend a long vacation with Fitzgerald. Already shaken to the foundation in his faith to GOD and his recognition of moral responsibility, and having mistaken the high talents he possessed and his vast pecuniary means as equivalent to personal worth he became an easy dupe for the world.

Fitzgerald was of high birth, and lived in a beautiful estate in Ireland, the inheritance of his family. Beyond his father and mother, the only inmate of the house was Constance Fitzgerald. The lustre of her beauty was far-famed, and her conscious vanity led

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