assistant surgeon,
Bandaged, and dosed, and nursed, and dressed,
And worked, as he ate and drank, with zest,
Until he began to blossom and burgeon
To redness of features and fulness of cheek,
And his starven hands grew plump and sleek.
But for all sign of wealth he wore
He swaggered neither less nor more.
He talked the stuff he talked before,
And bragged as he had bragged of yore,
With his Yankee chaff and his Yankee slang,
And his Yankee bounce and his Yankee twang.
And, to tell the truth, we all held clear
Of the impudent little adventurer;
And any man with an eye might see
That, though he bore it merrily,
He recognised the tacit scorn
Which dwelt about him night and morn.

The Turks fought well, as most men fight
For life and faith, and hearth and home.
But, from Teliche and Etrepol, left and right,
The Muscov swirled, like the swirling foam
On the rack of a tempest driven sea.
And foot by foot staunch Mehemit Ali
Was driven along the Lojan valley,
Till he sat his battered forces down
Just northward of the little town,
And waited on war's destiny.

War's destiny came, and line by line
His forces broke and fled.
And for three days in Orkhanie town
The arabas went up and down
With loads of dying and dead;
Till at last in a rush of panic fear,
The hardest bitten warriors there
Turn'd with the cowardly Bazouk
And the vile Tchircasse and forsook
The final fort, in headlong flight,
For near Kamirli's sheltering height;
While through the darkness of the night
The cannon belched their hate
Against the flying crowd; and far
And near the soldiers of the Tsar
Pour'd onward towards the spoil of war
In haste precipitate.

And the little adventurer sat in a shed
With one woman dying, and one woman dead.
Nothing he knew of the late defeat,
Nothing of Mehemit's enforced retreat;
For he spoke no word of the Turkish tongue,
And had seen no Englishman all day long.
So he sat there, calm, with a flask of rum,
And a cigarette 'twixt finger and thumb,
Tranquilly smoking, and watching the smoke,
And probably hatching some stupid joke,
When in at the door, without a word,
Burst a Circassian, hand on sword.
And the sword leapt out of its sheath, as a flame
Breaks from the coals when the fire is stirred.
And Mr. King, with a "What's _your_ game?"
Faced the Tchircasse with the wild-beast eyes.
"Naow, what do you want?" said Mr. King.
Quoth the savage, in English, "The woman dies!"
"Wa