d its
owner, a bad Frenchwoman. And the railway was in full work, and the
great road nearly finished, and the old one passable, and the mules
and horses looked in such fair condition, that you would scarcely have
believed Farrier C----, of the Land Transport Corps, who would have
told you then, and will tell you now, that he superintended, on one
bleak morning of February, not six months agone, the task of throwing
the corpses of one hundred and eight mules over the cliffs at Karanyi
into the Black Sea beneath.

Of course the summer introduced its own plagues, and among the worst
of these were the flies. I shall never forget those Crimean flies, and
most sincerely hope that, like the Patagonians, they are only to be
found in one part of the world. Nature must surely have intended them
for blackbeetles, and accidentally given them wings. There was no
exterminating them--no thinning them--no escaping from them by night
or by day. One of my boys confined himself almost entirely to laying
baits and traps for their destruction, and used to boast that he
destroyed them at the rate of a gallon a day; but I never noticed any
perceptible decrease in their powers of mischief and annoyance. The
officers in the front suffered terribly from them. One of my kindest
customers, a lieutenant serving in the Royal Naval Brigade, who was a
close relative of the Queen, whose uniform he wore, came to me in
great perplexity. He evidently considered the fly nuisance the most
trying portion of the campaign, and of far more consequence than the
Russian shot and shell. "Mami," he said (he had been in the West
Indies, and so called me by the familiar term used by the Creole
children), "Mami, these flies respect nothing. Not content with eating
my prog, they set to at night and make a supper of me," and his face
showed traces of their attacks. "Confound them, they'll kill me, mami;
they're everywhere, even in the trenches, and you'd suppose they
wouldn't care to go there from choice. What can you do for me, mami?"

Not much; but I rode down to Mr. B----'s store, at Kadikoi, where I
was lucky in being able to procure a piece of muslin, which I pinned
up (time was too precious to allow me to use needle and thread) into a
mosquito net, with which the prince was delighted. He fell ill later
in the summer, when I went up to his quarters and did all I could for
him.

As the summer wore on, busily passed by all of us at the British
Hotel, rumours stro