ed leg of mutton and caper sauce. Curry--chicken.
Sweets--Lemon jelly, blancmange, apricot tart, plum-pudding. Grilled
sardines, cheese fritters, cheese, dessert.' Truth compels the avowal
that there was no table-linen, nor was the board resplendent with
plate or gay with flowers. Table crockery was deficient, or to be more
accurate, there was none. All the dishes were of metal, and the soup
was eaten, or rather drunk, out of mugs and iron teacups. But it
tasted none the worse on this account, and let it be recorded that
there _were_ champagne glasses, while between every two guests a
portly magnum reared its golden head. Except 'The Queen,' of course,
there were but two toasts after the feast--one was 'Absent Friends,'
drunk in a wistful silence, and the other, the caterer's health,
greeted with vociferous enthusiasm. A few fields off the wood had been
collecting all day for the Christmas camp-fire of the 10th Hussars,
and by ten o'clock the blaze of it was mounting high into the murky
gloom. A right merry and social gathering it was round the bright glow
of this Yule log in a far-off land. The flames danced on the wide
circle of bearded faces, on the tangled fleeces of the postheens, on
the gold braid of the forage caps, on the sombre hoods of beshliks....
The songs ranged from gay to grave; the former mood in the ascendency.
But occasionally there was sung a ditty, the associations with which
brought it about that there came something strangely like a tear into
the voice of the singer, and that a yearning wistfulness fell upon the
faces of the listeners. The bronzed troopers in the background shaded
with their hands the fire-flash from their eyes; and as the familiar
homely strain ceased that recalled home and love and trailed at the
heart strings till the breast felt to heave and the tears to rise,
there would be a little pause of eloquent silence which told how
thoughts had gone astraying half across the globe to the loved ones in
dear old England, and were loath to come back again to the rum and the
camp fire in Jellalabad plain. Ah, how many stood or sat around that
camp fire that were never to see old England more? The snow had not
melted on the Sufed Koh when half a squadron of the troopers were
drowned in the treacherous Cabul river. No brighter soul or sweeter
singer round that fire than Monty Slade; but the life went out of
Monty Slade with his face to the foe and his wet sword grasped in a
soldier-grip; and