enance.

"Humph!" he ejaculated, and drew rein for the rear of the regiment to
file past.

"And now my poor boy will be sent away, Joe," said the agitated woman
that night; but Joe said nothing, not even when he felt his wife get up
and go to where the little fellow was sleeping soundly, and he heard her
utter a curious sobbing sound before she came to lie down again.

But no orders were given next day for the boy to be sent to the rear,
nor yet during the next week, during which the men were still hunting
frogs, as they called it--frogs which took such big leaps that the
toiling British soldiers could not come up to them.

"Oh, if they only would let us," Joe used to say every night when he
pulled off his boots to rest his feet. "It's my one wish, for we must
give 'em a drubbing, or we shall never have the face to go back to old
England again."

Joe had his wish sooner than he expected.

It was in a wild mountainous part of the beautiful country, so full of
forest and gorge that there was plenty of opportunity for the French to
hide their force on the mountain slopes of a lovely valley and let the
English regiment get well past them before they attacked.

The result was a desperate fight which lasted a couple of hours before
the 200th managed to extricate themselves with the loss of many killed
and wounded, and in spite of every man fighting like a hero, they were
beaten and had to suffer the miseries of a retreat as well as a defeat.

But the 200th did not fall back many miles before the major of the
regiment halted the main body of the men on the slopes of a rocky mount
which he determined to hold and to give the scattered and wounded a
chance to return, so a stand was made. For there was no hiding the
fact; the poor 200th had been badly beaten, as an English regiment might
reasonably be when every man was surprised and called upon to fight six,
mostly hidden from him by rocks and trees.

The enemy did not follow their advantage, so that the English had the
whole of that night to rest and refresh, though there was not much of
either, for upon the roll of the companies being called a hundred brave
men did not answer; many were wounded; and, worst misfortune of all, the
Colonel was among the missing, and had been seen last fighting like a
hero as he tried with a small company of men to save the baggage and
ammunition.

"And our poor boy, Joe," sobbed Mrs Corporal that night, as she sat by
the watch-fire,