'Have you a non-commissioned officer with you?' 'Yes, sir--Sergeant Carey,' 'Well, you and Sergeant Carey had better be off, or I'll make the place too hot for you. As for your brother, you can bury him for nothing beside the tent-pegs outside.' Every other morning some poor fellow was reported as dead in the wards, and they were buried in a little strip of ground near the canal, a tent-peg, with a label fluttering from it, alone indicated, in the meantime, the name and rank of the deceased. As Allan glanced around him, he saw cheeks that were pale, eyes that were sunk, and forms emaciated by wounds, loss of blood, and fever like his own of the worst enteric form. A somewhat oppressive odour of hot soup and poultices seemed to pervade the wards of the hastily improvised hospital, where, though wounds were dressed on Lister's antiseptic system, with a care and minuteness never before seen on a large scale in war, yet it was reported, and with justice, in the public prints, that through the meanness, economy, and incapacity of the Government, or the Government officials, 'the enormous hospital at Ismailia was opened without drugs, instruments, provisions, or stores, and was unable to supply the front with any medical essentials, and that there was also an extraordinary lack of hospital attendants. Officers who lay in the wards tell stories which are ludicrous though painful, of neglect and want of common food. All acknowledged themselves grateful for the kindness, sympathy, and skill of the doctors. The fault was not theirs; but _red-tape_ finished what incompetence began.' As Allan looked around him, a familiar figure in the undress uniform of the Black Watch caught his eye--it was that of an officer conversing in a low voice with one of the staff-surgeons, and he gave a nervous start as he muttered and closed his eyes. 'It is a chance likeness, and the world is full of chance likenesses.' He looked again; the figure--the man was still there, and he could see his full face now, with its light brown moustache and head of close-clipped golden hair. 'Great heavens, it is a day-dream of Evan Cameron!' said Allan to himself in a whisper. The blood in his veins seemed to congeal or to circulate like water that was icy cold. He had heard that we cannot look upon the supernatural and live, and so Allan believed that his hour had come. Feeling that it might be only a powerful but optical illusion, he continued to gaze at the figure with incredulity and awful dread. 'Cameron!' The name escaped him, while a strange sensation crept over Allan, and his voice as he spoke sounded thick in his own ears. But it was no optical illusion--no disembodied spirit he saw, as he thought he had done before, but his friend and comrade still in the body, but pale now and barely convalescent after the dreadful wound he had received.