w the cold, bitter smile that was on the face before me,
I knew that the fiend would leave me never more, and that I was mad!

What was a quarrel with my brother now? I stole back, and, lifting him
up, carried him to his room, where I washed the blood from his face.
When he came to himself I fell at his feet and besought his pardon, and
that he would keep what had happened a secret. He forgave me. And I
believe the only lie he ever told in all his life was when he told Lucy
that he had cut his head by falling on a jagged stone.

Oh, how often after that my fingers itched to be at his throat again;
but I always quailed before his steady eye.

I pass over the next few years, except to say that I went to college,
where I was shunned by all, though never alone: was a dunce, and plucked
twice. Perhaps it was I who shunned others, for had I not society in
the constant presence of my Familiar? I was of course a dunce, for my
brain was never steady enough to carry me over the _Pons Asinorum_, or
to make a Latin verse with even decent correctness. I went away in
disgust. I think if I had stayed longer I should have torn somebody, or
else myself.

I went next into the army. It was a new era in my life, and, strange to
say, my devil left me for a while, so that I was able to master the
details of my profession, and to be esteemed a good and careful officer.
There was hope, too, of active service; for the Russian Eagle was slowly
unfolding his vast wings for a new descent into the plains of Europe.
William, married to Her now, who was a lieutenant in the Foot Guards,
wrote to me to say that he hoped we should be really brothers, now that
we were to meet before an enemy; and the next day out came the
declaration of war. When I had read it, I drew my sword, and, as I ran
my eye along its cold, sharp blade from hilt to point, I thought how
strange was its power to let out a man's life, and turn him, in a
moment, into a heap of inanimate carrion.

Of course I am not going to tell the history of the great siege in the
Crimea, for every child knows by heart the tale of the clambering fight
up the Alma's steeps, of the withering volley that suddenly crashed out
of the gray twilight on the hill of Inkerman, of the long months of
starvation, of the final _feu d'enfer_, beneath which the Russian host
crowded over the narrow bridge that saved them from their foe. But of
the fatal charge of the Six Hundred I must speak, for I was one of th