tions of that barefaced Perry. Allow me to tell you that the officers of this distinguished regiment were proved to have merited reward, instead of censure, and Lord Hardinge has given them their promotion. The regiment is not here at least, none of it to speak of—having accompanied the 63rd on its tour.

Please present my kind love to Aunt Priscilla and Jessie, with compliments to the Reverend Mr. S., and believe me, dear sir, Very dutifully yours,

T. PEPPER.

Stationary Trenches, before Sebastopol, April, 1855.

MR. GUS,-Fanny Green may go and be shot, and you with her. She's possessed of no more sense than a codfish. I got your letter, inside the governor's, with her message. "That the style in which we dressed ourselves-in shreds of upper garments, and without shreds of lower-was disgusting, not to say ungentlemanly; and that I had fallen down, besides, in her estimation, in common with the rest out here, for shirking the storming of Sebastopol!" Who wants to shirk it? And who cares for F. G.'s" estimation ?" She had better come out and head us, and see how soon she'd go in and storm it. Why don't she set on and knit us some trousers, and buy us some stuff for waistcoats, and make it up, instead of throwing ridicule on our wardrobes? I should not have given you credit for lending yourself to report such girl's trash; unless you are degenerating into a girl yourself, which it is our belief you are-for I have shown your letter to Gill and Tubbs and Stiffing. I'll write to F. G. and blow her up. Stiffing says he wouldn't have her at a gift.

A precious chance we have of getting into Sebastopol! It is well known we might have taken it in September, when we first came, but we have let the chance slip by for doing it now, and I don't care who hears me say it. Tell F. G. to send a despatch by the electric telegraph (it will be open from here to Kensington before you get this) to our commander-in-chief, and demand of him and General Canrobert why they did not go in, at first, and take it. Marshal St. Arnaud was chief of the French army when we landed in the Crimea; he's dead, and some renowned generals of our own are since dead; but if she will send an atmospheric communication to the world of spirits, and put the same question there, perhaps she will be favoured with a reply. Tell her to try it on, Gus: she's green enough for that, or anything else. Gill says he does not care to know her now, and Tubbs says he wouldn't be introduced to her if he could.

I should like you to see the miles and miles of formidable batteries that have grown up round Sebastopol since last September. It's believed that we might have gone quietly in then, with a trifling loss of two or three thousand men there would be a loss of thirty thousand now, for the whole army will be annihilated if it tries at it. That's our opinion, and time will prove whether we are right. For every fresh gun that we set up, the Russians set up five, and as to holding Sebastopol if we did get in, the thing's not in the range of possibility, as affairs are now. A nice condition we have been in all the winter, to attempt the storming of any impregnable place! In my last two letters I have told you the undis

guised truth about our state, physical and bodily and ornamental, and the shameful straits we were reduced to: no food, no clothes, no huts, no beds, no medicine, no sleep; weak, sick, frostbitten, and feverish; and our horses working with their heads and tails off. I mean, ears and tails; but your letter has so put me up, I don't know what I write. And now you say you have never had my letters! Gus, you are a sneak. If you have not had them, where do you think they have got to-into the newspapers? No, Spark, it won't do. The post is bad enough, but not so bad as all that.

Take Sebastopol! In the last six months, fifteen thousand men have gone down to Scutari, ill, or dying, and about as many have gone into their graves. What do you suppose has sent us there? Warm clothing, and good fires, and sumptuous dinners, and air-tight houses, and rooms finished off with gilt cornices? If you choose to look at the returns, you'll see that some of the deaths are set down to fever, and some to scurvy, and some to dysentery, and some to cholera, and some to frostbites; but who has dared to set down the TRUTH-that nine-tenths of the whole have died of starvation and despondency? If you and England and Fanny Green think we ought to have had health and life kept in us, so as to hold our ranks entire, and to have been able, any day, to march in, with a strong hand, and smash Sebastopol, go and ask your high and mighty British government why it was not done. Let censure fall upon them for their wretched indifference and incapacity, but don't reproach us. Who is it that has reduced us to the plight we have been in? Who has exposed us to diseases, and then debarred us of the medicine to relieve them-who set us down in an unhealthy swamp, water above and below us, and would not send us huts to keep us dry-who let the frost and the snow of a northern winter come to us, and neglected to furnish us with means of shelter-who let our solitary suit of clothes wear off our backs into rags and live creepers, and gave us none to replace them who undertakes to send us out bedsteads, and despatches the frames here, and the legs and sacking off to Egypt-who was it sent the tops and doors of our huts, and forgot the sides, and the nails to put them up with-who has kept our beer and our fuel and our physic, and our boots and shoes, swinging about in ships, now at Constantinople, now at Balaklava, and now back again at Woolwich, and never landed the cargoes anywhere-and who has winked at our mass of steamers skulking idly in Balaklava harbour, and doing no earthly thing but eating away the nation's money, while provisions were within reach, and we were famishing? Go and ask the war-management who has done all this, and see if they can look you straight in the face, while they answer. There has been chaos and confusion and mismanagement out here, we all know, to our eternal cost, but that has not been the root of the evil. They'll punish the small fry, poor Christie and Filder, and those who were looking out for stars and garters, but your rich and powerful and incapable ministers will escape scot-free. They are going to hold up a mild general or two, who have not the luck of possessing influential connexions, to public opprobrium; but another general, who showed the most perfect and unexplainable indifference during the long weeks of our greatest need, they'll decorate, along with themselves! Major Gum declares he shudders to see a fresh batch of newspapers arrive in camp,

for the wilful misdoings, the unfortunate mistakes, and the universal imbecility, show forth more plainly, day by day. And the effrontery of their wanting to shuffle off their responsibility upon the nation, and make it fast and pray and humiliate itself in sackcloth and ashes to atone for their blunders! The camp decided that fast to be the richest jest that has come out yet. We wonder England stands it. Cuff says he thinks it can't know the millions of its tin that are being wasted-wasted, mind you, not used. There are many serious misgivings out here upon the aspect of affairs in England: and it is asked, throughout the camp, "Can it be that some strange chastening from on High is falling on it, and depriving its rulers of their faculties and powers?" "Quod Deus vult perdere, prius dementat." Tell F. G., with my compliments, that if I have not kept my clothes, I have kept my Latin.

Go in and storm Sebastopol! Where's the army to do it? What's the good, to us, of the raw recruits they have sent out in place of the good regiments which have died away? To be of service, we must have experienced and efficient soldiers-but we don't get them. We don't believe England knows the jolly mess we are in; or takes account of the thousands that have gone into hospital, the thousands who have died, and the hundreds who have sneaked home and cut it altogether. The governor, in the very letter in which he enclosed yours, sends a message to an officer in the 63rd Regiment. I have written him word back that the 63rd is gone on an excursion. So it is: part of it into Scutari hospital, and the rest into the Crimean sod. The 63rd came out 900 strong, and, in a short time, it was reduced to nine men fit for duty. Tell that to England. The governor's letter also happened to mention that crack regiment the 46th-into which jolly corps Gill and I have not yet given up hopes of exchanging. It has been annihilated, like the 63rd. It came out in November, 1000 strong; and 800 are dead or disabled. Do you know these facts in England? You are all wonderfully easy if you do. Why, months ago, if the government would not do anything for us, the people ought. Yah! you are all of a cheese-you, and F. G., and the country, and its ministers. The camp has, now, got letters that there's a committee sitting, to see who's in fault about the misdoings of the war; and the staff are crowing that though the mishaps come out pretty strong, the real authors don't. One officer (not on the staff) has got a friend, deep in the confidence of the executive government at home, and he has written to say it's all arranged about the evidence they are to give-nobody's to be in fault, and nobody to be proved responsible. Ministers, past and present, will deny or explain away everything that could tell against them-Admiralty, Ordnance, Medical, and all the rest of the departments, will do the same. Each set is to show out very bright and pure, and brag up the others: the conduct of the war will appear to have gone on admirably; and if the committee think to fix a hold upon any one for blame, they'll be diddled. This is not satisfactory news to us sufferers; and it's being asked, out here, "Will the people of England stand this? Will they let things go on, in this rumble-jumble, for another year or two, till the country's disgraced and done for, or will they take the reins of government into their own hands? As true as that you are alive, Gus, I heard that said in Captain Carnegie's tent last night. Carnegie was the man who had the

confidential letter, and he, and Gum and Cuff, and some half-dozen more, were comparing other letters and newspapers; and, in talking it over, they got as red, and excited, as fire's hot. Carnegie leans to the Lords, because his aunt's grandmother was a marchioness; but Gum and Cuff and the rest, who have got no interest, don't. They think they are hardly dealt by; something about the promotion; they are obliged to stop out and rough it, they say, whilst others can go home and live at ease, and get promotion over their heads.

"I think it will now be 'Aristocracy versus Intelligence,'" cried Gum, "and if the trial does come off, intelligence will gain the day." Carnegie was indignant: "D'ye call blood nothing?" he asked; "look at that which flows in the veins of the nobility."

"Blood's good," returned Gum, "but brains are better. Look at our merchants and commercial men-if their talents had been brought, in the first instance, to bear upon the war, do you suppose we should have been gasping out our lives here, in nakedness and famine, paralysed and incompetent, a byword for other nations to laugh at ?"

"Don't know about that," grunted Carnegie, "but a duke's a duke, and a baron's a baron; and if they do not display the business talents which seem to come natural to common people, their rank makes up for it. They have had the rule and swing of the country for ages, and John Bull, who's an easy, good-natured old soul, ought not to turn tail upon them now."

"We shall see," retorted the major; "it's turn tail, on the one hand, ruin on the other; and he must choose between them."

us.

And, Gus, we shall see. I'm blest if I much care how things turn out, for we can't be worse off than we are. By the way, talking of our rulers, I want you to get a song called "Peter Dick," and send it out to We hear it is the crack song, just now, in the Admiralty and government offices; that the clerks whistle it all day, standing on their heads in cocked hats, and beat time with a gold-headed cane. Stiffing knows a very nice fellow who is in the Ordnance department, the Honourable Tom Fireaway, and he says he is a slap-up whistler.

We had the primest joke, out here. Bob Rendal, one of our chaps, was in the last stage of camp fever, and through somebody's unaccountable mistake, my name went up instead of his, and an order came for me to go into hospital at Scutari, whilst his name was entered for the trenches. I took care to be off before they found it out, and Bob died. Tubbs-he was only jealous-said he wouldn't take advantage of the error. The idea! I wanted to see the girls who have come out, and away I went. I ran rushing up to the hospital when we reached Scutari, and while I was looking out for the girls, in hopes there were some pretty ones, I inquired after Ellison, one of our set who had gone down there, but he had made himself scarce, or the hospital gangrene had done it for him; and, instead of him, I came upon Hunter, looking like a ghost in a white nightcap. I couldn't get up a shadow of flirtation with the girls; they were the wrong sort for it, very staid and cranky, especially the nuns; and two or three, whom, by way of trying it on, I politely accosted with "I hope, miss, you are quite well," looked as cross as old Nick. It was no go, and there was not a bit of fun going on, and Hunter was too shaky to come out. That beast of a Jones was at

Scutari! When he was our lieutenant he had used to lead me and Gill the devil's own life, playing the sneak and letting out about us to Gum. He wanted to be sent home, but they had no writing-paper to write the application on, and I hope he's stopping there yet, praising up the British government and all connected with it. I'll tell you what I saw one of the nuns do. She was very busy over a fellow's bed, counting her beads, and reading to him, and praying, and confessing. The chap seemed as if he would interrupt her, but the more he tried, the faster she prayed and talked. At last she began to think him worthy of the consecrated wafer-or whatever the Roman Catholics call it-when he burst out with "Ma'am, I'm deadly obleeged to ye, but I be a Wesleyan methodiss."

"You are a what?" she said, starting up and staring at him. "A disciple of Wesley, ma'am. Folks call us methodisses."

"Your name is O'Connor; you are a Roman Catholic," cried the nun. "I was with you yesterday."

"Not a bit on't, ma'am," persisted the fellow. "I'm John Dobbs. O'Connor died in the bed this morning, and they have put me in his place."

The lady gave a gasp of horror, and went away; and Miss Nightingale said the nuns ought not to confess the men, for fear of these mistakes.

The telegraph's at work in the camp, from right to left, and across again. It's a stunning convenience. Captain Smith wants to send a message to Lieutenant Thompson-goes to telegraph and signals. "Hallo, old fellow! how's the grubbings in your quarter to-day; anything worth coming for? Short commons here." Back comes the answer, in a brace of shakes. "No go. Devilled scraps from yesterday. Out of everything." Smith growls, and tries it again: sends the same demand to Captain Dark, on the right attack, and gets the answer. "All right, old brick. Don't lose time. Turkey-pie and broiled ham; cigars and champagne-punch." Captain Smith goes tearing along, riding his pony's tail off, and gets there in time for a capital dinner with his friends. While they are making themselves jolly, afterwards, it occurs to them that Lieutenant Thompson would be an agreeable addition to the party, as he can sing a good song, so off goes one to the telegraph again, and signals the lieutenant. "Lieutenant Thompson wanted. Make good speed. Prime smoke; unlimited grog; going to make a night of it. Smith's here." "Can't," is the doleful answer, "those confounded trenches. Off at once. Wish the plague had the war." There are sea-gulls in England innocent enough to believe the telegraph's kept for official purposes, confined to Raglan and Canrobert, but I said I'd split about it. For, if you'll credit it, Gus, when I went to transmit a very important communication by it, to Stiffing, about some marmalade, the nasty shufflers refused to take it.

Don't you go writing me such messages again from that little ape, F. G. I am about to sit down now, and give her a blowing-up, and mind you smuggle the letter safely to her.-Yours,

Augustus Sparkinson, Esquire, junior.

TOM PEPPER.