gleaming, their once comely English faces distorted by hate and bitterness.

In sheets of lead the heavy juzail balls tore through them on every hand, and they fell faster than ever. Her Majesty's 44th Regiment was now reduced to two hundred men, and every man of the two hundred perished where he stood. But this bravery enabled some of the other corps to proceed further, and the last final stand was made by those unhappy men on the morning of the 13th January, on the knoll of Gundamuck, when twenty officers, sixty soldiers, and three hundred camp-followers alone survived.

Polwhele was the first who fell here; two balls pierced his chest; and there, too, perished all that remained of Waller's Company. If the fire slackened a moment, the clash of knife and bayonet was heard, with many a yell and groan.

"Dear Bob," cried Polwhele to Waller, as he lay choking in blood, "if you cannot carry me out of the field, take iny sword and this ring for my-my poor mother."

But Waller could do neither, for over Polwhele's body there thickly fell a heap of killed and wounded.

After his ammunition was expended, Sergeant Treherne, whom rage and desperation inspired with a fury resembling madness, laid wildly about him,

and with the heel of his musket dashed out the brains of more than one tall Afghan. This stalwart son of the Mines had come of a race that in their time had been greater men than miners in Cornwall-Huelwers, who were rulers then in the land before, perhaps, a stone of Windsor or Westminster had been laid; and now he stood like a hero on that fatal knoll of Gundamuck, beating down the foe with the butt-end of his clubbed weapon, till he fell, riddled with bullets, upon the corpses of his comrades.

Seeing all lost, Waller, his heart swollen almost to bursting, had now to seek his own safety. Concealed by the smoke and some wild pistachio trees, he found shelter in a cavern, though fearing that traces of his footsteps in the snow might lead to his discovery, and there he lay on the cold rocky floor, more dead than alive with excess of emotion and all he had undergone, panting, feeble, and well nigh breathless.

He had only his sword now, and even if he escaped the Afghans, wolves, bears, or hyænas— the mountains teemed with all of them-might come upon him in the night.

Being well mounted, Audley Trevelyan and two medical officers effected their escape, but were closely pursued by Amen Oollah Khan, and compelled to separate. One was overtaken and

slain within four miles of Jellalabad.

Audley's

horse was shot under him, and he concealed himself till nightfall in a nullah or ravine.*

The despatches record that of all the sixteen thousand five hundred who marched from the Cantonments of Cabul, ninety miles distant, Dr. Brydone, a Scottish medical officer of the Shah's service, bleeding, faint, covered with wounds, and carrying a broken sword in his hand, alone reached the city of Sir Robert Sale's garrison; but Trevelyan came in four hours after, to confirm his terrible tidings of the total destruction of our army and all its followers, for all who were not slain were made slaves by the captors.

At Gundamuck "the enemy rushed in with drawn knives, and with the exception of two officers and four men, the whole of this doomed band fell victims to the sanguinary mob.”—Memorials of Afghanistan, Calcutta, 1843.

Long prior to this event, Colonel Dennie, of the 13th, made a curiously prophetic speech. "His words were, 'you'll see that not a soul will escape from Cabul except one man, and he will come to tell us that the rest are destroyed."-Sale's Brigade.

Ackbar Khan is said to have uttered a similar prediction.

CHAPTER XXI.

WALLER'S ADVENTURES.

"RUN to earth at last!" groaned Bob Waller, whose subsequent perils were so varied and remarkable that they alone, if fully detailed, might fill a volume.

In that cavern or fissure, one of the many which abound in the rocks there, he lay the whole day, untraced and undiscovered, for the Afghans, after having stripped and mutilated in their usual fashion, the dead on the snow-covered knoll, had retired. He knew that he was only sixteen miles from that bourne they had all hoped to reach-Sale's little garrison in Jellalabad, and that if he ever attained it at all, the attempt must be made in the night. He was without a guide; he knew not the way, and his dress and complexion would render him to every shepherd, wayfarer, and marauding horseman, apparent, as a Feringhee and an enemy.

66

The whole affair, the retreat, and the result of it, seems to be what a French writer describes as one of those especial visitations of Fate, which draw on

the devoted to their ruin, and which it is impossible for virtue to resist, or human wisdom to foresee."

After seven days and nights of incessant fighting; after the perpetual ringing of musketry, the yells of the Afghans, the varied cries of those who perished in agony under their hands; after all the truly infernal uproar and mad excitement in those dark and narrow, Passes, the unbroken silence around him now, seemed intense and oppressive. He could almost imagine that he heard it; stirred though it was only by the low hum of insect life among the withered leaves and coss, or wild mountain grass, that lay drifted by the wind in heaps within the cave, and on which he lay so sad and weary.

"Now," thought he, after some hours had passed, now that this horrible row is all over, I'll have a quiet weed-smoke a peaceful calumet of Cavendish;" and he drew the materials therefor from the pocket of his poshteen.

Waller had always been solicitous about the colouring of that same calumet, as he styled his meerschaum pipe, which, by the bye, had been a gift from his friend Polwhele-poor Jack Polwhele-who was lying under that ghastly pile of dead on the knoll, where his jovial soul had ebbed through his death-wound, and where in his kind heart, and on his pallid lips, as he breathed his last, his mother's