bs and
heads were seen hurling about like the debris of a wrecked universe.
Much of this came down upon our iron deck. The clatter was appalling.
It was a supreme moment! I was standing on the flying structure beside
one of the officers. "Glorious!" he muttered, while a pleasant smile
played upon his lips. Just then I chanced to look up, and saw one of
the Russian fore-turret 85-ton guns falling towards me. It knocked me
off the flying structure, and I fell with an agonising yell on the deck
below.

"Hallo!" exclaimed a familiar voice, as a man stooped to raise me.

I looked up. It was my hospital-assistant. I had fallen out of bed!

"You seem to have had a night of it, sir--cheering and shouting to such
an extent that I thought of awaking you once or twice, but refrained
because of your strict orders to the contrary. Not hurt, I hope?"

"So, then," I said, with a sigh of intense relief, as I proceeded to
dress, "the whole affair has been--A DREAM!"

"Ah!" thought I, on passing through the hospital for the last time
before quitting it, and gazing sadly on the ghastly rows of sick and
wounded, "well were it for this unfortunate world if war and all its
horrors were but the phantasmagoria of a similar dream."

CHAPTER TWENTY.

TREATS OF WAR AND SOME OF ITS "GLORIOUS" RESULTS.

In process of time I reached the front, and chanced to arrive on the
field of action at a somewhat critical moment.

Many skirmishes, and some of the more important actions of the war, had
been fought by that time--as I already knew too well from the hosts of
wounded men who had passed through my hands at Sistova; and now it was
my fate to witness another phase of the dreadful "game."

Everywhere as I traversed the land there was evidence of fierce combats
and of wanton destruction of property; burning villages, fields of
produce trodden in the earth, etcetera. Still further on I encountered
long trains of wagons bearing supplies and ammunition to the front. As
we advanced these were met by bullock-trains bearing wounded men to the
rear. The weather had been bad. The road was almost knee-deep in mud
and so cut up by traffic that pools occurred here and there, into which
wagons and horses and bullocks stumbled and were got out with the
greatest difficulty. The furious lashing of exhausted and struggling
cattle was mingled with the curses and cries of brutal drivers, and the
heartrending groans of wounded soldiers, who, lyi