"I told you," said Sturdy to Jack, when the Gurnet, with the rest of the ships, had been withdrawn—"I told you we would be beaten. A beastly waste of gunpowder, I call it, and honest fellows' lives."
How very busy the Russians had been that night may be inferred from the fact that the dawn of the eighteenth day of October saw their breaches repaired, more guns mounted, and all the effects of the terrible bombardment entirely effaced.
On the twenty-third of October, the Gurnet being round at Balaklava, Dr. Reikie received from the trenches, among other wounded, our old friend the boy Harris. He had belonged to Peel's naval brigade, and very gallantly he had fought. Before the fighting had commenced, some weeks indeed, he had been one of the very merriest among our blue-jackets who helped to tow the guns up to the heights.
He had been cut down by a piece of shell which completely carried away his right arm. He had begged very hard to be sent on board the Gurnet, and although the surgeon who attended him believed from the first the case was hopeless, he had yielded to his request. He was placed under the awning in a hammock amidships.
"Ah!" he said, "I can die a kind o' easy now. Bother my wig, though, I should have liked to have seen the last of it. Ain't there any hope, doctor, sir?"
Dr. Reikie shook his head.
"I'll sit up with you," he said, "and—-see."
"Ah yes, I understand."
He lay still for a few minutes. Then he asked for his ditty-box—a small box possessed by every young sailor in which to keep his trinkets and valuables.
"Doctor, sir," he said, "you'll send this little box to my mother and father, won't you? Here is the old couple. I'll keep this as long as I last. Tell them that I died like a thousand o' bricks."