Down the Irrawaddy, across the Bay of Bengal, athwart Hindustan to Kurrachee at the mouth of the Indus I hurried; at Kurrachee caught the steamer for Aden, and at Aden there was Bill, impatiently grilling in that extinct volcano-crater till the Zanzibar packet should start. We dodged into every little obscure Portuguese-negro port along that coast--Quillimane, Mozambique, Magadoxa, Melinda, Lourenço Marquez--stagnant, fever-stricken, half barbarous places where, as it seemed, nobody was either quite black or quite white. We reached Port Durban about the middle of April 1879, to find its roadstead crowded with the transports that had brought the reinforcements out from England, and its hotels crammed with officers of all ranks and all branches of the services. General “Fred” Marshall, an old friend of Beresford and myself, commanded the regular cavalry brigade, and Bill hoped for a berth on his staff. But a better billet fell to him. Far up in the Transvaal Sir Evelyn Wood’s little brigade had just gained a brilliant victory over some 20,000 Zulus, who had made a desperate attack on its position. Colonel Redvers Buller commanded Wood’s irregular volunteer cavalry, and in the recent fight his staff officer, Major Ronald Campbell, had been killed. It was a peculiar and difficult post, and Campbell was a man whom it was not easy to succeed. The assignment rested mainly with Marshall, and on the night of our arrival, he, knowing Beresford better than most men then did, named him for the post. Full of elation;--Bill because of being chosen for a duty that assured him responsibility and plenty of fighting; I because my chum had so fallen on his feet,--we returned to our hotel. As we sat a while in the public room before retiring, there entered a couple of men far from sober. At first they were civil, and told us that one was the second officer, the other the ship’s surgeon, of a transport in the roadstead. Presently the sailor-man’s mood changed, and he became grossly insulting to Beresford; who for a while treated him good-humouredly. At last the fellow said he believed Bill was a coward. Then Bill quietly rose, and simply requested the nautical person to “come outside.” I did not half like the business, for the sailor was a big slab-sided fellow; whereas Bill is one of the light weights, and it was not pleasant to think of his carrying a black eye to his new appointment. But intervention did not seem possible; and it remained for the doctor and myself to “see fair.” In front of the hotel was a garden studded with rose-bushes. At it they went hammer and tongs; Bill fending off the big sailor’s “ugly rush” with skill and coolness--he had not been at Eton for nothing. In the third round the sailor was down, his head in a rose-bush, and Bill sitting thereon--the head, not the bush. The sailor did not want any more; every one shook hands round, and perhaps there was a drink of conciliation.