Amid the recollection of all those scenes of bloodshed, the memory of the little German artist's yearning for the unattainable stands out clear and distinct. It was connected with a German sausage; but in order to make the matter plain, it is necessary to point out that Gay and Lauri had expended about thirty pounds in equipping a private commissariat department before they came to Plevna. In Constantinople they had bought provisions of all kinds: English kippered herrings, American canned beef, potted vegetables of strange and fearful hues, portable meat lozenges, and last, but not least, a magnificent German sausage--not one of those insignificant cylinders of suspicious ingredients which are exposed for sale in the piping times of peace, but a sausage which was constructed, so to speak, on a war footing. It was about four feet long and one foot six inches in circumference, and it was enclosed in a metal case of the kind generally used to carry maps and charts. This noble specimen of _wurst_ was the apple of little Lauri's artistic eye. But, alas! I was ignorant of this. Before Gay went away, being incensed with Lauri over some trivial dispute, he presented me with the remains of the commissariat, which, it appeared, had been bought with his money, and which included the famous sausage. He also gave me several other things, including a capital bell tent, which, I am sorry to say, was afterwards stolen from me. However, when I got this sausage Lauri was away, camping, I fancy, in one of the redoubts, and I at once invited every good fellow that I knew in the place to come to the banquet. We had two meals off it, and then--where, oh, where was that triumph of the sausage-maker's art? "Where," asks that inspired bard Hans Breitmann, "is dat little cloud that fringed the mountain brow?" We procured some raki, the pungent Turkish spirit which burns a hole in the membrane of the throat as it passes down, and we had dinner. Then we procured some more raki, and we had supper. After that we looked round for the sausage; but it was gone--"gone where the woodbine twineth." Lauri came back to my quarters next day, and behaved with contumely when invited to sit down to our usual fare of boiled beans and rice. He consigned every individual boiled bean in Turkey to a place where it would soon become unpleasantly scorched, and then he mourned for the sausage, which he believed Gay had eaten in the silence of the night all by himself. "If only he had left me my peautiful sausage!" he wailed, while I said never a word, but only winked at Czetwertinski. When Lauri had continued every day for a week making lamentation over the loss of that satisfying yard and a quarter of food, I broke the news gently to him that we had eaten it in his absence. Contrary to my expectation, he was not seized with an apoplectic attack, and at last even became reconciled again to the "verdammte poiled peans."