tch made under fire is apt to turn out defective
in drawing. That highly effective and happy accidental touch in the
immediate foreground I claim no credit for. It was made by a bullet
which first knocked the pencil out of my hand and then terminated the
career of my best horse; while that sunny gleam in the middle distance
was caused by a piece of yellow clay being driven across it by the
splinter of a shell. On the whole, I think the sketch will hardly do
for the _Evergreen_, though it is worth keeping as a reminiscence."

My friend and I now sat down in front of a comfortable fire, fed with
logs from the roof of a neighbouring hut, but we had not chatted long
before he asked me the object of my visit to headquarters.

"To inquire about my friend Nicholas Karanovitsch," I said.

From the sudden disappearance of the look of careless pleasantry from my
friend's face, and the grave earnest tone in which he spoke, I saw that
he had bad news to tell.

"Have you not heard--" he said, and paused.

"Not dead?" I exclaimed.

"No, not dead, but desperately wounded." He went on in a low rapid
voice to relate all the circumstances of the case, with which the reader
is already acquainted, first touching on the chief points, to relieve my
feelings.

Nicholas was not dead, but so badly wounded that there was no chance of
his ever again attaining to the semblance of his old self. The doctors,
however, had pronounced him at last out of danger. His sound
constitution and great strength had enabled him to survive injuries
which would have carried off most men in a few days or hours. His whole
frame had been shattered; his handsome face dreadfully disfigured, his
left hand carried away, and his right foot so grievously crushed by a
gun-carriage passing over it that they had been obliged to amputate the
leg below the knee. For a long time he had lain balancing between life
and death, and when he recovered sufficiently to be moved had been taken
by rail to Switzerland. He had given strict orders that no one should
be allowed to write to his friends in England, but had asked very
anxiously after me.

Biquitous gave me a great many more particulars, but this was the gist
of his sad news. He also told me of the fall of Dobri Petroff.

"Nicholas had fainted, as I told you," he said, "just before the picket
by which he had been rescued lifted him from the ground, and he was
greatly distressed, on recovering, to find that hi