Far away from where the embattled Bala Hissar looked down on the flowing Cabul, on the Mosque of Baber and the Obelisk of Alexander the Macedonian, from the English cantonments and all their associations, even from thoughts of Rose Trecarrel's auburn hair and tender brown eyes, Denzil's mind, swifter than the electric telegraph, flashed home to the land from whence that letter came--to Cornwall with its mines below the rolling sea; to its granite quarries where the thunder-blast, loud as a salvo from the Bala Hissar, told of the riven rock; to its stone avenues solemn and hoary, and the great rock-pillars of the Fire Worshippers of old; to the dark brown moors of Bodmin, where in summer the drowsy bee hummed over the heath-bells and wild honeysuckle; to the towering bluffs on which the empurpled waves were rolling in the light of the sun as he set beyond Scilly, "the isles of the god of day;" to tarns where the water-lily floated, and to pools where the speckled trout was darting to and fro; to his rugged home, we say, went all his thoughts--to the Land's End with all its masses of splintered rocks, worn and bleached by the seas of ages, split and rent like columns of basalt amid the brine--rocks where the fresh-smelling seaweed and the scarlet sea-anemone clung, and on whose summit the weary miner sometimes sat and rested after his toil to watch the passing ships, or to ponder when next his pickaxe would discover "a lode of tin or a goodly bunch of copper ore" in those burrows beneath the sea over which the keels were gliding, their crews little wotting that human beings were in those lighted mines fathoms deep below;--over all these familiar scenes the mind of Denzil wandered, to settle again in fancy on his dead mother's face; to think of his sister's loneliness--of the vast distance by sea and land that separated them,--of his own now-narrow means; and his heart seemed to wither up within him. So the long night wore away, and the day began to break. Its advent was heralded by the boom of a 24-pounder from the Bala Hissar, by the merry drums and fifes giving the _reveillez_, and by strokes on the flat metal ghurries that hung in front of the guard-houses; but Denzil sat heedless, very pale, and absorbed in thought. * * * * * *