iment after regiment, officers and men, from the malarious
exhalations of the morass. Whole battalions were swept away. The ranks
were filled up by reinforcements from home, and these, too, went the
same road. Of one regiment the only survivors, according to the
traditions of the place, were a quartermaster and a corporal. Finally it
occurred to the authorities at the Horse Guards that a regiment of
Hussars would be a useful addition to the garrison. It was not easy to
see what Hussars were to do there. There is not a spot where the horses
could stand twenty yards beyond the lines; nor could they reach Fort
Augusta at all except in barges. However, it was perhaps well that they
were sent. Horses and men went the way of the rest. The loss of the men
might have been supplied, but horses were costly, and the loss of them
was more serious. Fort Augusta was gradually abandoned, and is now used
only as a powder magazine. A guard is kept there of twenty blacks from
the West Indian force, but even these are changed every ten days--so
deadly the vapour of that malarious jungle is now understood to be.

I never saw so spectral a scene as met my eyes when we steamed up to the
landing place--ramparts broken down, and dismantled cannon lying at the
foot of the wall overgrown by jungle. The sentinel who presented arms
was like a corpse in uniform. He was not pale, for he was a negro--he
was green, and he looked like some ghoul or afrite in a ghastly
cemetery. The roofs of the barracks and storehouses had fallen in, the
rafters being left standing with the light shining between them as
through the bones of skeletons. Great piles of shot lay rusting, as not
worth removal; among them conical shot, so recently, had this fatal
charnel house been regarded as a fit location for British artillerymen.

I breathed more freely as we turned our backs upon the hideous memorial
of parliamentary administration, and steamed away into a purer air. My
conservative instincts had undergone a shock. As we look back into the
past, the brighter features stand out conspicuously. The mistakes and
miseries have sunk in the shade and are forgotten. In the present
faults and merits are visible alike. The faults attract chief notice
that they may be mended; and as there seem so many of them, the impulse
is to conclude that the past was better. It is well to be sometimes
reminded what the past really was. In Colonel J---- I found a strong
advocate of the late arm