ife, had actually
heaved themselves over the parapets on the French right. They had
gone into action a thousand strong; they were now six hundred.
Charge after charge had flung forward a few to leap the rampart and
fall on the French bayonets; but now the best part of a company
poured over. For a moment sheer desperation carried the day; but the
white-coats, springing back off their platforms, poured in a volley
and settled the question. That night the Black Watch called its
roll: there answered five hundred men less one.

It was in the next charge after this--half-heartedly taken up by the
exhausted troops on the right--that John a Cleeve found himself
actually climbing the log-wall toward which he had been straining all
the afternoon. What carried him there--he afterwards affirmed--was
the horrid vision of young Sagramore of the 27th impaled on a pointed
branch and left to struggle in death-agony while the regiments
rallied. The body was quivering yet as they came on again; and John,
as he ran by, shouted to a sergeant to drag it off: for his own left
hand hung powerless, and the colours encumbered his right. In front
of him repeated charges had broken a sort of pathway through the
abattis, swept indeed by an enfilading fire from two angles of the
breastwork, slippery with blood and hampered with corpses; but the
grape-shot which had accounted for most of these no longer whistled
along it, the French having run off their guns to the right to meet
the capital attack of the Highlanders. Through it he forced his way,
the pressure of the men behind lifting and bearing him forward
whenever the ensign-staff for a moment impeded him. He noted that
the leaves, which at noon had been green and sappy, with only a
slight crumpling of their edges, were now grey and curled into tight
scrolls, crackling as he brushed them aside. How long had the day
lasted, then? And would it ever end? The vision of young
Sagramore followed him. He had known Sagramore at Halifax and
invited him to mess one night with the 46th--as brainless and
sweet-tempered a boy as ever muddled his drill.

John was at the foot of the rampart. While with his injured hand he
fumbled vainly to climb it, someone stooped a shoulder and hoisted
him. He flung a leg over the parapet and glanced down? moment at the
man's face. It was the sergeant to whom he had shouted just now.

"Right, sir," the sergeant grunted; "we're after you!"

John hoisted the