wards
that prone figure. He dropped into the front trench and trod upon
a wounded man who screamed beneath his heel, and climbed out on the
further side. The air was musical with hooting shell and singing shot
and hissing bullet as if a whole diabolic orchestra were fiddling and
bugling. Polson found the fallen body of his foe, and hugged it in
his arms, and raced back as hard as he could tear. He tumbled into the
trench of the first parallel almost anyhow; but he gripped the man he
hated, and in his soul was a great rejoicing. He tore up the opposite
side, and came out upon the open slope again, with the unconscious man
still in his arms.

'You'll ruin me, you devil!' said Polson, as he ran breathlessly with
the wind of shot and shell in his ears. 'And I'm to report myself to you
to-morrow, am I? We may report ourselves to Almighty God together, but
_you_ are safe for the minute, I guess.'

He was within a yard of his own post when these mad exaltations of an
excited fancy crossed his mind, and at that instant a musket shot took
him in the neck and he fell with his burden into the trench before him.

CHAPTER XI

We swoop, as it were, to the skies, and we drop, as it were, to the very
sea bed, and we are seasick to the souls of us, one and all; and of
the five hundred men the staunch boat carries, there are a round four
hundred and fifty wounded, and a round four hundred who will never see
the skies with conscious eyes again. We are bound for Scutari, where
an enlightened intelligence, awakened at last to some beginning of
elementary necessity, has established a hospital; for Government,
as usual in such matters, after five hundred years of more or less
victorious prowling to and fro in the world and more of gathered
experience than any other body of men ever had in the history of the
world, has positively made up its mind to shelter broken bones and sick
bodies from the mere inclemencies of the weather.

It would not have done so much had it not been for the intervention of
a lady whose name deserves to be immortal so long as the British Empire
paints itself red upon the map; but Florence Nightingale had enlisted
the sympathy of English hearts more quickly than the Queen's shilling
had enlisted fighting men, and the Crimean hospitals were the centre
of a thousand human interests. The authorities had somehow caught and
impounded the good ship _Caesar_ at Odessa, and had despatched it to a
desert bay with no