who took part in them; but I shall confine my remarks to a few of the veterans who have recently gone to their rest.

Not ten years have elapsed since Lord Combermere, who commanded the allied forces under the Iron Duke in the Peninsula, passed away at the age of 93, while as recently as the 12th of January of the present year died at Brighton Admiral Sir Augustus P. Westphall, the last surviving officer of Nelson's ship-the Victory-at Trafalgar. A few days earlier the sailor who was in charge of the boat which landed Napoleon at St. Helena, sixty years ago, died at the age of 96. Almost on the same day died Captain Payne, formerly of the Grenadiers, aged 91, who had seen some hard fighting before many of the white-haired men of the present day were born. Five years ago died Lord Gough, who entered the army in 1794, and still more recently Field-Marshal Sir John Fox Burgoyne, the son of the unprincipled and unsuccessful, though courtly and accomplished General Burgoyne, of the old American war of independence, passed away. Sir John Burgoyne held an important command in the Peninsula sixty years ago, and yet survived the close of that great war nearly two generations.

The past winter has greatly thinned the ranks of the survivors of the old wars, fought before our fathers were born, and while our grandfathers were babies in arms. Only a few aged soldiers are still alive who connect us with Nelson, Abercrombie, and Moore. One of these relics of olden times died on the 15th of March, at Brighton: Field-Marshal Sir William Maynard Gomm, a gallant old soldier, Colonel of the Coldstreams and Constable of the Tower, had served everywhere and had done good service everywhere. He carried the colours of his regiment into action, in Holland, in 1798, and was made a K.C.B., in 1815. One feels that in losing such brave veterans something has dropped out of the history of the world, which increases the interval separating us from the great wars and memorable events of seventy and eighty long years ago.

VIII.

A MODERN BATTLE.-Reviews and mimic representations of battles have always possessed for me a strange and inexplicable interest The order, the discipline, the fine physique of the men, the enlivening strains of the bands, have had and still have for me a charm, a fascination, which nothing else has ever imperilled.

Before I knew quite so much of the circumstances amid which battles are really fought, I used to watch with great admiration some of the caricatures of war at which I chanced to be present. On one occasion I found myself near two thousand men, five deep, who for a quarter of an hour were keeping up a terrific fusillade on

an imaginary enemy a couple of hundred yards off. It was a pretty sight, but quite unlike a real battle. On another occasion I remem. ber skirmishers being thrown out from a dense mass of infantry. The skirmishers were in the old order of two-and-two. One man fires, and runs back, and loads; his comrade then fires, and, in like manner, retreats behind his companion. The ground was as level as a table, and the pairs of skirmishers so close together that, drawn out in a single line, they would have found it difficult to keep within the space they were occupying. Their main body was drawn up, four deep, fifty yards off, and presenting a mark which, in actual warfare, would in five minutes have cost as many hundred lives.

At Woolwich it is sometimes edifying to see dense masses of men marching with the steadiness of a wall, bolt upright, exposed to a hot fire from long lines of skirmishers two hundred yards off. The spectators are delighted, and the actors, I suppose, are expected to learn something-what is not quite clear-that may hereafter be of service to them.

No! a real battle is widely different. In deep hollows are placed the artillery wagons and horses, where they are as much as possible protected from fire. Any cover is seized upon to shelter the gunners working the guns. Dense masses of men are never allowed to expose themselves, and are as much as possible kept under cover, a mile or more from the enemy's big guns. Cavalry are kept in deep defiles, or in woods, or behind the brow of a hill. Skirmishers creep along the ground, using every particle of cover they can find, and knowing that exposure means almost certain death. The skirmishers, too, are dotted over the ground, at the distance of a couple of yards from one another, and generally at some distance from any body of their own men. A modern battle generally extends over several miles of ground.

Let anyone think of what modern weapons are, of what a fusillade can be kept up, of the accuracy of fire, the alarming length of range, and then he will see how little reviews resemble real battles. In the old French war it would have been safer to march at a distance of a hundred yards froin hostile battalions than it would now be to expose oneself at a distance of four hundred yards to the fire of skirmishers. Not, however, that troops are never exposed in these days; for in the late Franco-Prussian war successful attacks were more than once made by bodies of troops which advanced across open ground; but when any manœuvre of the kind is attempted there is a definite object to gaiu, and the cost is deemed worthy of the risk. But unless the advantage or necessity were great, cavalry would not, as one sees at autumn manœuvres, be allowed to mask the tire of their own infantry, nor

would artillery be placed where the guns could not be worked, and cavalry be exposed to almost certain annihilation.

At the autumn manœuvres of 1873 I remember seeing an amusing incident, one, however, which in real war, would have brought death to many a brave fellow. Over the brow of a hill swarms of Sir John Douglas's skirmishers were creeping, pouring a tremendous fire into the defenders of the attacked position, held by the Prince of Saxe-Weimar's troops. The attacked position, apparently the key of Prince Edward's position, was held by the Coldstreams, who were lying in the heather, availing themselves of the little cover they could get, though the huge black bearskins and the well-developed chests of the men were visible in all directions. Steadily the attacking skirmishers approached until not two hundred yards off; then, with a desperate valour, reminding one of Balaklava, the 2nd Life Guards, who were in the rear of the Coldstreams, were ordered to charge the former. They dashed at the attacking skirmishers, who had to form line to receive them. This gave the Coldstreams an opportunity of firing two or three rounds apiece at their enemies. The hostile skirmishers poured a volley into the Life Guards, who at once went off to the right and left in great confusion. Now occurred the incident I allude to. The firing recommenced between the Coldstreams and Sir John Douglas's men, who had just beaten off the Life-Guards, when, suddenly and ominously, the fire of the Foot-Guards slackened, then completely ceased. In short their ammunition was exhausted. Then, in a second, they were ordered to fall back, and from hundreds of places in the heather rose huge Guardsmen, who ran helter-skelter to the woods in the rear, all the time exposed to a merciless fusillade. In three minutes, in a real battle two or three hundred Coldstreams would have fallen, exposed as they were to a heavy fire from men scarcely a hundred yards off, to which they could not reply. Fortunately it was only a comedy, not a tragedy, and so one could enjoy the sight.

VISIT TO THE ISLE OF AMSTERDAM.

WE hear the name of Calcutta mentioned every day; but, like many other names, we few of us inquire as to its origin. What is it ?--The couch of the destroyer's wife-Kalee, the Hecate of the Hindoos; the same being, as Bhowaunee, Doorgha, Purwuttee, Shewa, the female who is supposed to exercise predominant power over the devil, being his spouse; and who is more universally worshipped than any of the deities of the Hindoo pantheon. How ubiquitously is her name found in the nomenclature of the cities, towns, and other localities throughout Hindoostan! Kalee Nuddee, the stream of Kalee; Shewagungh, the town of Shewa; Kalee Cut, which is the same as Calcutta, also in the names of the children. Finding her so much the object of mention, as well as so highly honoured, puts one in mind of the injunction to the maid Europa,

"Bene ferre magnam, disce fortunam,

Tua sectus orbis, nomina ducet."

Thus Kut, or Cutta, is a couch; and Kal-Kutta a couch of Kalee; and, for all that the East India Company nabobs cared, the couch and its worshippers,-the frightful sacrifices she loved, and the frightful creed which her followers believed in,-might have flourished to this moment.

It remains with Him who rules, the arbiter of supreme destiny, whether they may not, under the high authority that now sways the country, be swept away like the myths of other ages, and become as nothing, and the altar and the god sink together in the dust, or whether the benighted votaries of superstition may be benighted still. Humanly speaking, one step towards the accomplishment of the object so devoutly to be wished, is the amelioration of the English who colonise the country; the men who exhibit to heathendom what Christians are; and when you come to consider the sort of examples which the life and conduct of the English in former time showed, you cease to wonder at the rarity of instances where Hindoos had become converted; and, in fact, you arrive at the conclusion that it would not have been astonishing had such instances never occurred.

But the lads assembled in the south barracks at Calcutta were determined to enjoy themselves to the utmost, and what will not youths find merriment in? There Clarence Hervey saw around him the strangeness of the Oriental scenes, which seemed like the delusive

visions in the dissolving views,-so bright, so vivid, and so multifarious, the city, which in its approach by the broad muddy river, seems a continual series of superb palace-like villas, surrounded by magnificent grounds, where grow all the evergreen exotics prized by botanists in the richest profusion; the spacious extent of the Ganges, thronged with merchant ships of all burdens, together with the numerous native craft, misshapen, lumbering, large and small, manned by numerous natives, nearly wholly naked; the wide, parched-up plains, the course, the lofty buildings, the black town, where thousands of stalls, stocked with varieties of goods and native edibles, ranged at the base of narrow streets of houses which are high, dark, grim, and dirty, form a bazaar with its crowds, its heat, its dust, and its fetid odour; the glaring light in a sky unclouded from the earliest morning till sunset, beaming from a sun so overpowering as to render it impossible to brave it without shelter; the palanquins-curious conveyances, like huge oblong chests, with poles protruding out of each end, having near them at hand always numerous natives naked, except as to their waistcloths, ready to carry you wherever you wished, and loud in their offers to do so. For European inhabitants there are large-roomed houses, within which they must necessarily pass the whole of the day, and, surrounding which are the verandahs or outer courts, where are to be seen constantly moving about numbers of muslin-dressed male attendants in turbans and bare feetnative dealers, primitive merchants as they are (dressed in the same sort of primitive costume as the Sansculottes that ply the palanquins), who deposit before your passive gaze their large box, and, opening out its treasures, invite you, imploringly, to take some of them. These the English residents, in their usual way of mingling native words into a compound-which in its hybrid character is neither one language nor the other-call box wallas.

These different sights and scenes, at first, with many more too multiform to mention, and some too hideous to dwell upon, were novel, laughable, and even amusing to young Clarence Hervey. But he was not sorry when the order came for him to leave the South Barracks, and to proceed up the country to join his regiment, at Barrack poor. This station lies on the river, and is about fifteen miles from Calcutta. It was not liked because of the reduced pay which the officers received there a reduction which, however, the Governor-General considered politic, as the grand object was to render the up-country stations, where the pay was better, more popular with the troops than those in the vicinity of Calcutta. Bad as the latter city is as to climate, and devoid as it is of aught that can favour out-door recreation, yet its dissipations and its pleasures had charms for those of the military who could afford to