ONLY AN ENSIGN. CHAPTER I. BEYOND THE LAND OF THE SUN. FAR, far away from rough and rocky Cornwall— from steep Tintagel with all its memories of King Arthur's knights, his "Table Round" and flirting queen; from the traditionary haunts of its giant Tregeagle, and from its wondrous mines deep, deep down below even the blue waves of the Atlantic; far away beyond the Indus and the frontiers of British India, fifteen hundred miles from Calcutta, and seven hundred from the shores of the Arabian Gulf, we have to change the scene to where a British army, under General Elphinstone, was cantoned before the city of Cabul, ere we can look after the fortunes of Denzil Devereaux, of whom we have barely thought, while progressing through an entire volume of our story. A detachment of his regiment, under a captain VOL. II. B named Waller, was attached to General's Trecarrel's Native Infantry Brigade; and an afternoon in November of the second year after the military occupation of the province by her Majesty's troops, found him quartered, with his brother officers, the aforesaid captain-popularly known as Bob Waller -a lieutenant named Jack Polwhele, also of the "Cornish Light Bobs," in one of the little native forts, of which a dozen or more lay scattered over the plain between the British cantonments and the bleak range of hills named Siah Sung, or "the Black Rocks." The apartment in which the three were seated, each in a bamboo easy chair and wearing furtrimmed poshteens (or native pelisses) above their blue undress surtouts, while they idled over brandypawnee and a box of cigars, was neither luxurious nor splendid, being simply a portion of a half shattered tower of native construction, before the windows of which the Bengal Sappers had erected a species of verandah, as a promenade and shade from the sun in summer; but now the season was winter; and though the evening was temperate, a fire blazed merrily in the open grate-less fireplace, and shed a cheerful glow on the whitewashed walls, the only adornments of which were certain caricatures (executed by Waller with burnt cork) of the regimental adjutant, of the brigade major, of "old Elphinstone," or other personages, to him more or less obnoxious. A charpoy or native bedstead, a few bullock-trunks, an overland ditto, an iron washing-stand, several pairs of boots, a few swords, whips, guns and hogspears, with any number of bottles, full or empty, littering the corners, made up the splendours of Bob Waller's quarters in the fort, from which, some two years before, Sir Robert Sale's brigade had summarily expelled sundry unwilling Kussilbashes at the point of the bayonet. The rooms of Denzil and Jack Polwhele in other parts of the same rude edifice were precisely similar; but their soldiers were hutted in the cantonments close by. One window of Waller's room faced the hills to the westward and the Arab-looking village of Behmaru, which means "the place of the husbandless," from a legend of the time of old-remote, perhaps, as the wars of Mohammed Ghori. An Afghan maid of high rank had been betrothed to a chief whom she tenderly loved; for the Afghans, though strict Mussulmen, neither seclude their wives, as others usually do, nor wed without duly winning them. But tidings came that he had fallen in battle against the Hindoos, on which she pined away and died. The news, however, was premature, for the chief recovered from his wounds, and returned to find only her grave on the hillside now called Behmaru; so he brought from Bourkhor one of those strange and spectral-like white stones, which, when placed upright, so closely resemble an eastern woman in her drapery, and set it above her tomb. In his old age he, too, was laid beneath it, and in time to come a village sprung up there. Another window faced the south, affording the more ample view of the huts and compounds (i.e., hedges and palisades) of the British Cantonments, and about two miles beyond them the great city of Cabul, surrounded of course by a fortified wall, as what city in that part of the world is not. Here and there rose above the flat roofs of its narrow streets the tower or castle of a chief; the dome or minar of a mosque; and the huge mass of its vast bazaar, built in the time of Aurengzebe, when it became the trade emporium of Central Asia; and high over all, the Bala Hissar, or palace (wherein resided the Shah Sujah, whose power our troops had come most unwisely to uphold) and which was also the citadel or fortress-a place of vast strength; and far away in the distance, rising like the waves of a frozen sea against a deep blue sky, were the mighty peaks of Kohistan and Hindoo Koosh, in height fourteen thousand feet above the plain, and crowned by eternal snows, unchanged in aspect and character, as the dwellers there have been since Alexander marched past them with his Greeks to |