tell you from its beginning. Please
look back to Chapter VIII., and see how hard the right woman had to
struggle to convey herself to the right place.

CHAPTER XIV.

MY CUSTOMERS AT THE BRITISH HOTEL.

I shall proceed in this chapter to make the reader acquainted with
some of the customers of the British Hotel, who came there for its
creature comforts as well as its hostess's medicines when need was;
and if he or she should be inclined to doubt or should hesitate at
accepting my experience of Crimean life as entirely credible, I beg
that individual to refer to the accounts which were given in the
newspapers of the spring of 1855, and I feel sure they will acquit me
of any intention to exaggerate. If I were to speak of all the nameless
horrors of that spring as plainly as I could, I should really disgust
you; but those I shall bring before your notice have all something of
the humorous in them--and so it ever is. Time is a great restorer, and
changes surely the greatest sorrow into a pleasing memory. The sun
shines this spring-time upon green grass that covers the graves of the
poor fellows we left behind sadly a few short months ago: bright
flowers grow up upon ruins of batteries and crumbling trenches, and
cover the sod that presses on many a mouldering token of the old time
of battle and death. I dare say that, if I went to the Crimea now, I
should see a smiling landscape, instead of the blood-stained scene
which I shall ever associate with distress and death; and as it is
with nature so it is with human kind. Whenever I meet those who have
survived that dreary spring of 1855, we seldom talk about its horrors;
but remembering its transient gleams of sunshine, smile at the fun and
good nature that varied its long and weary monotony. And now that I am
anxious to remember all I can that will interest my readers, my memory
prefers to dwell upon what was pleasing and amusing, although the time
will never come when it will cease to retain most vividly the pathos
and woe of those dreadful months.

I have said that the winter had not ended when we began operations at
the British Hotel; and very often, after we considered we were fairly
under spring's influence, our old enemy would come back with an angry
roar of wind and rain, levelling tents, unroofing huts, destroying
roads, and handing over May to the command of General Fevrier. But the
sun fought bravely for us, and in time always dispersed the leaden
cl