Nevertheless, all was joyous bustle and excitement, and when three days later they embarked for home all were in high spirits. They had a comfortable voyage, and the few survivors, only a handful who had come out from England with the regiment, used to gather on the deck in the evening, and while they smoked their pipes fight their battles over again, and relate to one another the adventures they had passed through with comrades, alas! no more. ‘You and I, Will, of all the trumpeters who came out are the only two left,’ said Jack one magnificent evening as he and Will leant over the taffrail watching the sunset. ‘Napper dead of cholera, Brittain and Parkes killed at Balaclava, poor old Linham and the trumpet-major invalided, and Tom Callon discharged with one arm.’ ‘Don’t talk about it, Jack; we’ve added new honours to the regiment, but we’ve paid the full price.’ After a prosperous voyage the good steamer _Candra_ dropped anchor in Queenstown Bay, and next day the regiment was disembarked. And then a surprise was in store for the ‘Death or Glory Boys.’ The band of a Hussar regiment came to play them to the station, and when the regiment marched out through the dock-gates they saw a vast multitude of people. English troops had never been popular in Ireland; even in England they had been coldly treated. The army had waned in popularity during the forty years of peace since the Peninsula days. But for two years the people had been full of the doings of the troops. They had read with moist eyes and kindly hearts the story of the heights of the Alma, of the valley of Balaclava. Their feelings had been wrung when they read of the thousands dying of cholera, of cold, of starvation, and of overwork before Sebastopol. Their pulses had been quickened when they learned how the ragged, famished, disease-stricken handfuls had hurled back into the fog, whence they emerged, the thousands of the Czar, contending on the slopes of Inkermann from dawn almost till sunset, dying proudly--nay, joyously--where they stood, but never retreating. And, lastly, they had glowed with pride when they heard of the dogged pertinacity with which the handful of heroes, struggling against almost every evil to which an army is open, maintained that stubborn fight in the trenches, enduring without one word of complaint, facing with cheerfulness every danger, suffering privation in silence, meeting death and wounds before the enemy with a smile of contempt, or willingly yielding up their lives from sickness, because they held it was their duty. Every soldier had fulfilled his promise to Queen and Country.