They had gone in under 800 strong; the charge cost them 363 of their number, including sixteen officers. But that charge in effect wrecked France. It arrested the French advance till supports came up to Alvensleben, and to its timely effect is traceable the current of events that ended in the surrender of Metz. It was a second Balaclava charge, and a bloodier one; and there was this distinction, that it had a purpose, and that that purpose was achieved. It succeeded because of the noble valour and constancy of the troopers who made it. Balaclava proved that our troopers possessed those virtues in no feebler degree. Till the millennium comes there will be emergencies when cavalry that will “charge home” and “sacrifice itself” may be employed purposefully; and cavalry should never be allowed to forget that this is its ultimate _raison d’être_. There is the risk that it may do so, if it is kept always skulking around the fringes of operations, and not given any opportunity of being “a little shooted.” A CHRISTMAS DINNER DE PROFUNDIS I have eaten a good many Christmas dinners in strange places, and have gone without the great feast of our nation in yet stranger. I have lost my Christmas dinner in a wholly unexpected manner, and have achieved that meal by a not less unexpected stroke of good fortune. At noon on Christmas Day, just thirty years ago, the outlook for our Christmas dinner consisted of a scrap of raw rusty pork and a ship-biscuit sodden in sea-water; and the prospect of even that poor fare was precarious, in face of the momentary danger of a watery grave. Four hours later I was the guest at a board groaning with the good cheer appropriate to the “festive season.” Just of age, I had been spending the summer of 1859 in travelling through Canada, and in the late autumn found myself in Quebec, intending to be back in England in time for the Christmastide with my relatives at home. One evening I took stock of my financial resources, and found I had only a very small sum to the fore--barely enough to clear me in Quebec and pay my fare to England either as steerage passenger in a steamer or as cabin passenger in a sailing-vessel. I had made the passage out very pleasantly in an emigrant sailing-ship. It had been a summer voyage, and I did not reflect that on the Atlantic summer does not last the year round. My pride rather revolted at a steerage passage, and I determined on the cabin of a sailing-ship. I know now, but I did not know then, that the sailing-ship trading between the United Kingdom and Quebec is of the genus “timber-drogher,” species ancient tub, good for no other trade, and good for this only, because, no matter how leaky the timber-laden ship may be, owing to the buoyancy of her cargo she cannot sink, and (unless the working of her cargo break her up) the worst fate that can befall her is that she becomes water-logged.