On an evening early in September, the very day that a telegram announcing the fall of the Redan reached Craigaderyn, they were dressing for a county ball at Chester--a long-looked-for and most brilliant affair--when their sensibility, and fear that I might have been engaged, made them relinquish all ideas of pleasure, and countermand the carriage, to the intense chagrin of Sir Watkins and also of the Plunger, who had come from town expressly to attend it. Two day afterwards the lists were published, and the account of the slaughter of our troops, and the death of so many dear friends, had made Winifred positively ill, so change of air was recommended for her, at Ventnor or some such place.
A postscript to this, in Dora's rapid hand, and written evidently surreptitiously (perhaps while Sir Madoc had left his desk for a moment), added the somewhat significant intelligence, that "Winny had wept very much indeed on reading the account of that horrible Redan" (for Phil's death, thought I; if so, she mourns him too late!) "and now declares that she will die an old maid." (It is so!) "When that interesting period of a lady's life begins," continued Dora, "I know not; if unmarried, before thirty, I suppose; thus I am eleven years off that awful period yet, and have a decidedly vulgar prejudice against ever permitting myself to become one. Papa writes that Sir Watkins is undecided; but I may add that I, for one, know that he is not. Our best love to you, dear old Harry; but O, I can't fancy you without an arm!"
I was in a fair way of recovery now. The state I had been in so long, within the four walls of that quaint little chamber--a state that hovered between sense and insensibility, between sleeping and waking, time and eternity--had passed away; and, after all I had undergone, it had seemed as if
"Thrice the double twilight rose and fell,
About a land where nothing seemed the same,
At morn or eve, as in the days gone by."
This had all passed and gone; but I was weak as a child, and worn to a shadow; and by neglect had become invested with hirsute appendages of the most ample proportions.
And so, without the then hackneyed excuse of "urgent private affairs," on an evening in summer, when the last rays of the sun shone redly on the marble bluffs and copper-coloured rocks of Cape Khersonese--the last point of that fatal peninsula towards the distant Bosphorus--and when the hills that look down on the lovely Pass of Baidar and the grave-studded valley of Inkermann were growing dim and blue, I found myself again at sea, on board the Kangaroo--a crowded transport (or rather a floating hospital)--speeding homeward, and bidding "a long good-night to the Crimea," to the land of glory and endurance.
Sebastopol seemed a dream now, but a memory of the past; and a dream, too, seemed my new life when I lay on my couch at the open port, and saw the crested waves flying past, as we sped through them under sail and steam.
Onward, onward, three hundred miles and more across the Euxine, to where the green range of the Balkan looks down upon its waters, and where the lighthouses of Anatolia on one side, and those of Roumelia on the other, guide to the long narrow channel of Stamboul; but ere the latter was reached--and on our starboard bow we saw the white waves curling over the blue Cyanean rocks, where Jason steered the Argonauts--we had to deposit many a poor fellow in the deep; for we had four hundred convalescent and helpless men on board, and only one surgeon, with scarcely any medicines or comforts for them, as John Bull, if he likes glory, likes to obtain it cheap. It was another case of Whig parsimony; so every other hour an emaciated corpse, rolled in a mud-stained greatcoat or well-worn blanket, without prayer or ceremony of any kind, was quietly dropped to leeward, the 32-pound shot at its heels making a dull plunge in that huge grave, the world of water, which leaves no mark behind.
I gladly left the Kangaroo at Pera, and, establishing myself at the Hôtel d'Angleterre, wrote from thence to Sir Madoc that I should take one of the London liners at Malta for England, and to write me to the United Service Club in London; that all my plans for the future were vague and quite undecided; but I was not without hope of getting some military employment at home. The Frankish hotel was crowded by wounded officers, also en route for England or France, all in sorely faded uniforms, on which the new Crimean medals glittered brightly. As all the world travels nowadays, I am not going to "talk guide-book," or break into ecstasies about the glories of Stamboul as viewed from a distance, and not when floundering mid-leg deep in the mud of its picturesque but rickety old thoroughfares; yet certainly the daily scene before the hotel windows was a singular one; for there were stalwart Turkish porters, veritable sons of Anak; stagey-looking dragomen, with brass pistols and enormous sabres in wooden sheaths; the Turk of the old school in turban, beard, slippers, and flowing garments; the Turk of the new, whom he despised, close shaven, with red fez and glazed boots; water-carriers; Osmanli infantry, solemn, brutal, and sensual, jostled by rollicking British tars and merry little French Zouaves; and for a background, the city of the Sultans, with all its casements, domes, and minarets glittering in the unclouded sunshine.
Two light cavalry subs, who had ridden in the death ride at Balaclava, and bore some cuts and slashes won therein, three others of the Light Division, and myself, agreed to travel homeward together; and pleasant days we had of it while skirting the mountainous isles of Greece, Byron's