And he saw the lean dogs beneath the wall Hold o'er the dead their carnival, Gorging and growling o'er carcase and limb. They were too busy to bark at him. From a Tartar's skull they had stripped the flesh As ye peel the fig when its fruit is fresh, And their white tusks crunched o'er the whiter skull As it slipped through their jaws when their edge grew dull, As they lazily mumbled the bones of the dead When they scarce could rise from the spot where they fed. In this passage the poet has described with more detail than one cares to give in a plain narrative the scene which was enacted every morning in the early part of that month of January within the walls of Erzeroum. It was about January 8 that I took the fever, which was by this time ravaging both the civil and military population. At first I tried to shake it off, and continued to walk about with aching head and quaking limbs in the hope that it might not have got a fair hold of me. On the second day I became quite stupid, though I still refused to go to bed, and on the evening of that day Pinkerton died. Next morning we buried him. Wood was so difficult to get, that we were put to great straits to make a coffin for him; but at last we contrived one out of an old packing-case. Pinkerton was a very tall man, and the flimsy coffin was hardly big enough for the body. There was scarcely enough wood to make the lid fit properly. When we were making the preparations for the burial, I was myself nearly delirious with typhus, and almost the last thing that I can remember before going off altogether was the sight of the miserable coffin with a gaping crevice in the top, through which the end of poor Pinkerton's silky fair beard was protruding. Denniston notified Hakki Bey, the civil governor, of our loss; and an escort of soldiers came down and buried our comrade by the side of Dr. Guppy, who had died on duty in the same place before we arrived there. The burial service was read by the Rev. Mr. Cole, an American missionary, who was in Erzeroum, accompanied by his wife and family and by a young American lady, also engaged in missionary work among the Armenians. Then the soldiers fired a volley over the grave, and the career of the fine young army surgeon was closed. When I was put to bed, the whole strength of the medical and assisting staff of the two English hospitals, Lord Blantyre's Hospital and that of the Stafford House Committee, was reduced to one man, namely, Dr. Denniston. Guppy and Pinkerton were dead, and Williams, Morisot, and myself were down with typhus. Under these circumstances, Denniston was left with the two hospitals full of patients to look after as well as us three at home, and he rose to the occasion most heroically.