master, and shrank startled from the sick couch. As the month of August drew to a close it was evident to those who lovingly watched beside the sufferer that the end was close at hand. It came on the early morning of the 29th. The full light of the summer morning was streaming into the room, lighting up the shields, swords, and standards of Eastern fight which hung upon the walls; the old colours of the Twenty-Second, rent and torn by shot, moved gently in the air, fresh with the perfume of the ripened summer; wife, children, brothers, servants, and two veteran soldiers who had stood behind him in battle, watched--some praying, some weeping, some immovable and fixed in their sorrow--the final dissolution; and just as the heroic spirit passed to Him who had sent it upon earth, filled with so many noble aspirations and generous sympathies, a brave man who stood near caught the flags of the Twenty-Second Regiment from their resting-place and waved these shattered emblems of battle above the dying soldier. So closed the life of Charles Napier. When a great soldier who had carried the arms of Rome into remotest regions lay dying in the imperial city, the historian Tacitus tells us that "in the last glimpse of light" the hero "looked with an asking eye for something that was absent." Not so with Napier. Those he had loved so devotedly, those who had fought around him so bravely, those who had shielded his name in life from the malice of enemies, and who were still to do battle for him when he was in the grave--all these loving, true, and faithful figures met his last look on earth. They laid Charles Napier beneath the grass of the old garrison graveyard in Portsmouth, for the dull resentment of oligarchic faction is strongest in the death of heroes, and a studied silence closed the doors of the two great cathedrals of the capital against ashes which would have honoured even the roll of the mighty dead who sleep within these hallowed precincts. Faction, for the moment dressed in power, forgot that by neglecting to place the body of Charles Napier with his peers, it was only insulting the dust of ten centuries of English heroism; and yet even in this neglect the animosity of power misplaced was but able to effect its own discomfiture, for Napier sleeps in death as he lived in life--among the brave and humble soldiers he had loved to lead; and neither lofty dome nor glory of Gothic cathedral could fitter hold his ashes than the narrow grave beside the shore where the foot of Nelson last touched the soil of England.