FOX-HUNTING RECOLLECTIONS 3 



departure from Malta we, like the rest of the 

 army, were ill-provided with suitable clothing, 

 and I remember the joy with which I received at 

 last a fur coat and a pair of long brown boots sent 

 out from England, ready-made and not exactly a 

 perfect fit ; but to me at that time they were 

 beyond all price. I kept well, and was as happy 

 as the day was long (the days were rather long in 

 the trenches) ; but soon after Sebastopol was 

 evacuated by the Russians on the 8th September 

 1855, I had a very bad turn of Crimean fever, and 

 was sent down to the hospital at Scutari, where 

 my head was shaved, and for some weeks it seemed 

 doubtful how matters would end for me. Our 

 chief interest in hospital was to watch for Florence 

 Nightingale as she passed through the wards with 

 a gentle word for all, — a weary time until I im- 

 proved and was invalided to England towards the 

 end of 1855. My Crimean experience was at the 

 age of from nineteen to twenty, and, looking back 

 to such distant times, it seems to me nowadays as 

 if those scenes had been in another world, and I 

 feel myself a veritable Rip Van Winkle as I muse 

 upon those far-off days and wonder how many 

 officers still survive who landed at Balaclava with 

 the old Fighting Fourteenth on that November 

 day in 1854. 



February 1856 found me gazetted to the Rifle 



