I heard some of our wounded, in their triumph at the general success of the past day, attempting feebly and in quavering tones to sing "Cheer, boys, cheer;" while others, in the bitterness of their hearts, or amid the pain they endured, were occasionally consigning the eyes, limbs, and souls of the Ruskies to a very warm place indeed. Estelle's ring, which I had still worn, was gone with my unfortunate arm, and was now the prize, no doubt, of some hospital orderly. Next day, as the wounded were pouring in as fast as the dripping stretchers and ambulances could bring them, I was sent to the monastery of St. George, which had been turned into a convalescent hospital. The removal occasioned fever, and I lay long there hovering between life and death; and I remember how, as portions of a seeming phantasmagoria, the faces of the one-eyed corporal who attended me, and of the staff doctors Gage and Jones, became drearily familiar. This monastery is situated about five miles from Balaclava and six from Sebastopol, near Cape Fiolente, and consists of two long ranges of buildings, two stories in height, with corridors off which the cells of the religious open. The chapel, full of hospital pallets, there faces the sea, and the view in that direction is both charming and picturesque. A zigzag pathway leads down from the rocks of red marble, past beautiful terraces clothed with vines and flowering shrubs, to a tiny bay, so sheltered that there the ocean barely ripples on the snow-white sand. But then the Greek monks, in their dark-brown gowns, their hair plaited in two tails down their back, their flowing beards, with rosary and crucifix and square black cap, had given place to convalescents of all corps, Guardsmen, Riflemen, Dragoons, and Linesmen, who cooked and smoked, laughed and sang, patched their clothes and pipe-clayed their belts, where whilom mass was said and vespers chanted. Others were hopping about on crutches, or, propped by sticks, dozed dreamily in the sunshine under shelter of the wall that faced the sparkling sea--the blessed high road to old England. My room, a monk's cell, was whitewashed, and on the walls were hung several gaudy prints of Russian saints and Madonnas with oval shining metal halos round their faces; but most of these the soldiers, with an eye to improvement in art, had garnished with short pipes, moustaches, and eyeglasses; and with scissors and paste-pot Corporal Mulligan added other decorations from the pages of _Punch_.