f manhood on the battlefield can acclaim
their leader. The wasted forces had naturally gone, but as the gleaming
candle light led Florence Nightingale from couch to couch, the wakers
turned and gave such signals as they could. The pitying, watchful,
gracious face went by, and the candle light departed.

A good many weeks and months went by before the name of the owner
of that gracious face and that memorable smile was known even to the
parting souls and suffering bodies which were cheered by it.

Spring comes up earlier in the region of Scutari than it does in London,
and there were many scores of ragged silken-bearded fellows rambling up
and down the streets of the place on crutches before the first leaf
had declared itself in any park in London, and almost before the first
wayside flower had bloomed in any English country hedgerow.

Away to the north-east of the hospital lies that cemetery which for
many a year to come will be a place of pilgrimage for the British
globe-trotter. There are the hunched, high-shouldered monuments of many
buried men, with the turban with its wreathen carvings to indicate the
resting place of the master sex. In those days, when the shallow graves
were being very quickly filled, the convalescent inmates of the hospital
made the cemetery their favourite promenading ground, and it was
here, upon a shining March Monday, that Polson and Major de Blacquaire
encountered each other on their wanderings amid the tombs, the one on
crutches, and the other painfully supporting his footsteps by the aid of
a walking stick.

'Since they began to sort us about,' said De Blacquaire, 'I've lost
sight of you. And you've never answered my question. Now, what the devil
_did_ you do it for?'

'Look here,' said Polson, using his favourite locution, 'you've
threatened two or three times to make an end of me.'

'Yes,' said the Major, nodding and drawling on the word. 'That's right
enough, But what's that got to do with it?'

'Well, you see,' said Polson, 'I'd got to give you the chance to do it.'

'Had you?' said Major de Blacquaire.

The one man was leaning on his crutches, and the other was stooping on
his crutch walking-stick, and there was nobody near so far as either of
them could see.

'I don't know,' said De Blacquaire, in a drooping voice. 'I may be all
wrong, and in a sort of way knocked to pieces, don't you know. But I
think on the whole, Sergeant, that you have acted like an unusually
damned