STARTING from Calcutta on his homeward voyage with wounds barely healed, and still suffering from the lassitude induced by fever and weakness, Yorke was at first more disposed to indulge in his habitual mood of dwelling on the disappointments of the past than to find enjoyment in anticipations of the future. And yet there was room for satisfaction as well as regrets in a retrospect of the twelve years since he had last seen the

sea.

How short the time seemed to look back upon, and yet how much had happened in it! Then he was landing in India a friendless cadet; now he was a lieutenant-colonel, decorated, commanding a crack cavalry regiment -an object of admiration, as he thought with not unnatural complacency, to all the younger officers of the army-and with every prospect of attaining to the command of a division before he got to middle age. Truly, if the Mutiny had brought desolation to many

VOL. CXIX.-NO: DCCXXIII.

it had made a career for the survivors: pluck and luck had done it in his case; with some more of the latter commodity to help, what might not be possible in the future?

"What a tremendous

personage I used to consider a lieutenant-colonel and C. B. in my young days! To be sure,

lieutenant-colonels used to be very old fellows then, and C.B.'s rarer than they are now; but still, even according to present lights, it is not a bad grade to have reached before one is thirty. And yet," thought he, "the change is not altogether for the better. I was fresh and ingenuous then, a believer in men and women, and one dream of my youth at any rate has not been realised. It is not success which has made me hard and cynical-if I am so, as people say—but disappointment and humiliation. Men call me the lucky colonel, and think me greatly to be envied; they little know that I have failed to get the one thing I ever really tried

A