The Englishman turned to thank me for my timely aid, but, instead of speaking, looked at me with amused surprise.
“Can it be?” I exclaimed; “not possible! you, Biquitous?”
“I told you we should probably meet,” he replied, sheathing his sword, “but I was not prophetic enough to foretell the exact circumstances of the meeting.”
“Come along, my dear fellow,” said I, seizing his arm and dragging him up-stairs; “how glad I am! what an unexpected—oh! never mind the look of the room, it’s pretty tight in most places, and I’ve stuffed my overcoat into the shell-hole.”
“Don’t apologise for your quarters, Jeff,” returned my friend, laying his sword and revolver on the table; “the house is a palace compared with some places I’ve inhabited of late. The last, for instance, was so filthy that I believe, on my conscience, an irish pig, with an average allowance of self-respect, would have declined to occupy it.—Here it is, you’ll find it somewhere near the middle.”
He handed me a small sketch-book, and, while I turned over the leaves, busied himself in filling a short meerschaum.
“Why, how busy you must have been!” said I, turning over the well-filled book with interest.
“Slightly so,” he replied. “Some of these will look pretty well, I flatter myself, in the Evergreen Isle, if they are well engraved; but that is the difficulty. No matter how carefully we correspondents execute our sketches, some of these engravers—I won’t say all of them—make an awful mess of ’em.
“Yes, you may well laugh at that one. It was taken under fire, and I can tell you that a sketch made under fire is apt to turn out defective in drawing. That highly effective and happy accidental touch in the immediate foreground I claim no credit for. It was made by a bullet which first knocked the pencil out of my hand and then terminated the career of my best horse; while that sunny gleam in the middle distance was caused by a piece of yellow clay being driven across it by the splinter of a shell. On the whole, I think the sketch will hardly do for the Evergreen, though it is worth keeping as a reminiscence.”
My friend and I now sat down in front of a comfortable fire, fed with logs from the roof of a neighbouring hut, but we had not chatted long before he asked me the object of my visit to headquarters.