"'Can't you aim better than that, you fool? If I were your officer, I'd give you thirty lashes for wasting the government ammunition!'

"Well, as I said, he got the St. George, and of course everbody congratulated him, and there was a great shaking of hands, and giving of good wishes, and drinking his health in mavro tchai,—that's a horrid mess of eggs, and scraped cheese, and sour milk, and Moldavian wine, which these Danube fellows have the impudence to call 'black tea,' as if it was anything like the good old tea that we Russians drink at home! (I've always thought, for my part, that tea ought to grow in Russia; for it's a shame that those Chinese idolaters should have such grand stuff all to themselves.)

"Well, just in the height of the talk, Pavel Petrovitch takes the cross off his neck, and holds it out in his hand—just so—and says:

"'Well, gentlemen, you say I'm the coolest man in the regiment, but perhaps everybody wouldn't agree with you. Now, just to show that I want nothing but fair play, if I ever meet my match in that way, I'll give him this cross of mine!'

"Now, among the officers who stood around him was a young fellow who had lately joined—a quiet, modest lad, quite a boy to look at, with light curly hair, and a face as smooth as any lady's. But when he heard what the colonel said, he looked up suddenly, and there came a flash from his clear blue eyes like the sun striking a bayonet. And then I thought to myself:

"'It wont be an easy thing to match Pavel Petrovitch; but if it can be done, here's the man to do it!'

"I think that campaign was the hardest I ever served. Before I was enlisted, I had often heard it said that the Turks had no winter; but I had always thought that this was only a 'yarn,' though, indeed, it would be only a just judgment upon the unbelievers to lose the finest part of the whole year. But when I went down there I found it true, sure enough. Instead of a good, honest, cracking frost to freshen everything up, as our proverb says,

"'Na zimni kholod
Vsiaki molod'—

(in winter's cold every one is young), it was all chill, sneaking rain, wetting us through and through, and making the hill-sides so slippery that we could hardly climb them, and turning all the low grounds into a regular lake of mud, through which it was a terrible job to drag our cannon. Many a time in after days, when I've heard spruce young cadets at home, who had never smelt powder in their lives, talking big about 'glorious war' and all that, I've said to myself, 'Aha, my fine fellows! if you had been where I have, marching for days and days over ankles in mud, with nothing to eat but stale black bread, so hard that you had to soak it before you could get it down; and if you'd had to drink water through which hundreds of horses had just been trampling; and to scramble up and down steep hills under a roasting sun, with your feet so swollen and sore that every step was like a knife going into you; and to lie all night in the rain, longing for the sun to rise that you might dry yourself a bit,—perhaps then you wouldn't talk quite so loud about "glorious war!"