their straw, with the death-rattle sounding in their throat—expiring, unheeded and uncared for, without a friend to behold them or a hand to close their eyes; and as soon as they were cold, they were seized by the hospital orderlies,[*] and carried off for interment. [*] Well-conducted soldiers, excused from duty to attend the sick. A wretched combination of misery, pain, and sorrow the interior of that little chapel presented, and it made a deeper impression on Stuart and Alister than on De Mesmai, who was an older soldier, and had beheld, in twenty years’ campaigning, too much bloodshed and agony to recoil at the sight of it there; but he loudly expressed his pleasure at beholding the attention paid to his countrymen. He saw that no distinction was made; the wounded of both nations received the same attendance from the medical officers and their orderlies; and more than one grenadier of _the Guard_ allowed his dark features to relax into a grim smile, as his red-coated attendants held up his head, to pour down his throat some dose of disagreeable stuff. "Ha! Stewart," said Ronald, catching his namesake the assistant-surgeon by the belt as he was rushing past, with a saw in one hand and a long knife gleaming in the other. "Don’t detain me, pray. I have just clapped the tourniquet on that poor devil in the corner. I have to take his arm out of the socket, at the shoulder, too—a fearful operation: you’ll hear his shrieks immediately. Sorry to hear you are under arrest. You will get through it though, doubtless,—being a favourite." "Where is D’Estouville, the French major; and how is he?’ "Near his last gasp, poor man. You need not go to him now, as he is dying; and troubling him will not lengthen his life a second. I could do nothing more for him, and so have resigned him to his fate. I must attend to our own people, whose lives are of more consequence,—every man being worth exactly twenty pounds to government, as you will see in—I forget what page of the ’Mutiny Act.’" "How can you jest in such a horrid den as this? You surgeons are strangely cool fellows, certainly. But D’Estouville—" "Is lying yonder at the foot of that marble monument. Do not trouble him now; he will be dead in five minutes. Excuse me: I have to amputate a leg to prevent mortification, and its owner is growling and swearing at my delay."