A ring or a watch, or it might be a lock of hair, taken, or perhaps hastily shorn by a friendly hand from the head of a dead officer as he was borne away to these pits--the head that some one loved so well, hanging earthward heavily and untended--shorn for a widowed wife or anxious mother, then at home in peaceful England, or some secluded Scottish glen; and there his obsequies were closed by the bearded and surpliced chaplain, who stood book in hand by the edge of the ghastly trench, burying the dead wholesale by the thousand; and amid the boom of the everlasting and unrelenting cannonade, now going on at the left attack, might be heard the solemn sentences attuned to brighter hopes elsewhere than on earth, where "Death seemed scoffed at and derided by the reckless bully Life." "Here is an old swell, with no end of decorations," said a couple of our privates, as they trailed past the body of a Russian officer, one half of whose head had been shot away, and they threw him into a trench where the gray-coats lay in hundreds. The "old swell" proved to be the brave Pulkovnich Ochterlony of Guynde; he who had led his regiment so bravely at Bayazid on the mountain slopes of the Aghri Tagh in Armenia, when, in the preceding August, the Russians had defeated the Turks, and laid two thousand scarlet fezzes in the dust. The episode of meeting with Guilfoyle, his conduct after the action, and the character he had borne as a civilian, formed a topic of some interest for my friends, who were vehement in urging me to denounce this distinguished "cornet" of the wagon-corps to the commander-in-chief. And this I resolved to do so soon as I was sufficiently recovered to write, or to visit Lord Raglan in person. But to take action in the matter soon proved impossible, as he was taken prisoner the next day by some Cossacks who were scouting near the Baidar Valley, and who instantly carried him off. Some there were in the camp who gave this capture the very different name of wilful desertion, from two reasons; first, he had been gambling to a wonderful extent, and with all his usual success, so that he had completely rooked many of his brother officers, nearly all of whom were deserving men from the ranks; and second, that on the day after he was taken, the Russians opened a dreadful fire of shot and shell on one of our magazines, the exact _locale_ of which could only have been indicated to them by some traitor safe within their own lines; and none knew better than I the savage treachery of which he was capable.