ean?" asked Molly, peeping over her
grandmother's shoulder before she began to read. "Look Sylvia, how
funny!" and she pointed to a long row of * * * * at the end of the
first part of the manuscript.

"They mean that some length of time had elapsed between the two parts of
the story," said grandmother.

"Oh, I see. And each star counts for a year. I suppose. Let me see; one,
two, three----"

"Molly, _do_ be quiet, and let grandmother go on," said Ralph and Sylvia,
their patience exhausted.

"No, they are not counted like that," said grandmother. "Listen, Molly,
and you will hear for yourself."

"The first part of my little story finished in the snow--on a cold
December morning in England. The second part begins in a very different
scene and many, many miles away from Ryeburn. Three or four years have
passed. Some of those we left boys are now men--many changes have taken
place. Instead of December, it is August. Instead of England we have a
far away country, which till that time, when the interest of the whole
world was suddenly concentrated on it, had been but little known and
still less thought of by the dwellers in more civilised lands. It is the
Crimea, children, and the Crimea on a broiling, stifling August day. At
the present time when we speak and think of that dreadful war and the
sufferings it entailed, it is above all the _winters_ there that we
recall with the greatest horror--those terrible 'Crimean winters.' But
those who went through it all have often assured me that the miseries of
the summers--of some part of them at least--were in their way quite as
great, or worse. What could be much worse? The suffocating heat; the
absence, or almost total absence, of shade; the dust and the dirt, and
the poisonous flies; the foul water and half-putrid food? Bad for the
sound ones, or those as yet so--and oh, how intolerably dreadful for the
sick!

"'What could be much worse?' thought Jack Berkeley to himself, as after a
long killing spell in the trenches he at last got back to his tent for a
few hours' rest.

"'My own mother wouldn't know me,' he said to himself, as out of a sort
of half melancholy mischief he glanced at his face in the little bit of
cracked looking-glass which was all he had to adorn himself by. He was
feeling utterly worn out and depressed--so many of his friends and
companions were dead or dying--knocked down at that time quite as much by
disease as by Russian bullets--in many cases the