hand in his own, and soothing it as a mother would a fretful babe. "Your father is indeed dead," he whispered low. "He passed away from us this day week only, from cholera, so suddenly that he could leave no word of you, or of his affairs. May God's will be done!" All the military vanity of the man went out of him as he spoke of a lost comrade, and he sat silent and still, watching the passionate grief of Mathias, and letting it have full vent, for more than an hour. Then he rose up, saying gently, "Let us go to our own countrymen; they all knew your father and loved him, though he took no part in the defence, and they will tell you all that can be known." Passively, Mathias suffered himself to be drawn away, but a great cloud of disappointed affection settled down on him, to leave him no more. "H CHAPTER II. BITTER REALITY. USH! did you not hear something?" asked Mathias, one bitter cold morning about three o'clock, when returning with his friend Hunyady from visiting a poor fellow who had been seized with cholera in the Tahmasb tabia. "No!" was the somewhat impatient answer: “I hear nothing but the breeze before dawn. Come on; I'm nearly frozen, and there is some hot coffee in my tent." "But I do hear something, comrade. It is like the sound of-of heavy waggons below." "The sound of waggons!" Hunyady knelt down on the plateau, with his ear to the ground, and listened attentively: "No; it's nothing. I cannot hear anything." Mathias thought he might have been mistaken, and the two walked briskly on climb. until they came to some new entrenchments, over which they had to A Turkish guard was set here, and they found the men grouped on the foremost angle, whispering eagerly. They called to Hunyady that they heard 'something' on the plain below, but could not make out what it was. Again they all listened intently for a while. Then the noise was heard this time unmistakably. "Heavy waggons!" said Hunyady: “Perhaps guns. It means an attack, if anything, and I must go and warn the General." Bidding the men keep a careful look out, the two ran rapidly to General Kmety's quarters to report. In half an hour the whole line of entrenchments was manned with the troops silently called together: word was sent into the citadel and to the other tabias of the long defences of the position, and every man in the army stood to his weapons. The sounds came nearer and nearer on the chill morning breeze; then some one with sharp eyes declared he could see a dark moving patch on the plain below. At once hundreds of keen eyes peered in the same direction; a second or two of hesitation, and then. it was unanimously whispered from one to the other that the 'patch' was a large column of troops moving silently on to the attack. Every gun that could possibly be brought to bear was loaded with grape and trained on the column of Russians; a moment's pause; the word was given; the guns simultaneously belched forth their deadly fire, and agonizing shrieks of pain and rage from below told the fearful havoc the rain of grape-shot had made in the Russians. Finding that they were discovered, and that the Turks were waiting to receive them, the enemy at once threw off the silence and secrecy under cover of which he had hoped to surprise the entrenchments; his guns poured in a fierce storm of shot and shell, and, with wild shrieks for revenge, the Muscovites came charging up the slopes in thousands. Thus commenced the famous battle of Kars of the 29th September, 1855. Mathias Kisfaludy had, when the first awful shock of his father's death had passed into a dull, painful, abiding sorrow, taken the advice of Hunyady and others of his countrymen, and successfully applied to General Williams for permission to aid-being far too I weak and delicate to bear arms with any credit to himself or his nation--the weak staff of surgeons in their arduous and painful duties. He could not fight with men with the smallest chance of being useful; but he could be of the greatest service superintending the sluggish native servants in the hospitals, and otherwise assisting the overworked medical staff; and to that duty he devoted himself with an energy, true courage, and devotion that called forth the loud praises of even the most callous or cynical. On this fearful day of battle, the approach of which Mathias was the first, as we have seen, to announce, he outdid himself in his exertions to succour and relieve the piles of wounded, who, in a very brief time, crowded the tabias and entrenchments. Four times did the Muscovites absolutely capture the redoubts, and four times did the brave Turkish soldiers, encouraged and cheered by the dauntless valour of the English and Hungarian officers, drive them vanquished out of the works and down the slopes up which they had charged. At the same time, attacks were made by the enormous force of the Russians on U every side of the defences; the castle and town, even, were shelled from the north; not a corner was left untried by their swarming legions; not an entrenchment but was lost and won, taken and re-taken, some time in the course of the day; and not a possible manœuvre or stratagem of war but was tried over and over again in the course of the tremendous conflict. But the battle raged fiercest at the points where it had commenced-the Tahmasb tabia—and there and thereabouts did young Kisfaludy find the hottest, and to him the best field for labour. Though a non-combatant, he exposed himself as freely (a good deal more freely than some of the overfed Pashas) as any warrior of them all; rushing with his bearers into the thick of the fight to carry away the wounded; giving water and stimulants to those who could not be carried off at once; tying up as well as he could the fearful gashes and rents made by Russian bayonets or bullets; and calmly, every now and then, pausing to survey the aspect of the battle, so that he might judge where his aid would next be most wanted. After one desperate charge of the Turks, when they had, by mere physical strength and almost superhuman bravery, driven the Russians helter-skelter out of a redoubt the latter had taken and held for more than an hour, Mathias entered with the victors, and found the en |