In the afternoon Colonel O’C----r returned our visit, and came on board the Harbinger. The nimble manner in which he glided up the ladder of the ship, and presented himself in his white toggery to our gasping selves, was a riddle, the solving of which would have melted our brains in that broiling sun. Had it not been for the gleam that shone now and then from his glazed, brown eye, which was like a parched pea, one might have taken him for an automatic mummy. The same horse-tail I mentioned as having been waved over his head while reclining at home, was now carried by himself; and in answer to a question put to him by young K---- of the 74th, he explained that it was a Mandingo emblem of authority, which had the twofold power of keeping off the flies and keeping the niggers in awe. When, in after-life, I became a Turkish Pasha with two tails, I often used to look up to the sort of barber’s pole on which was appended the same horse-tail token of authority, and think of Colonel O’C----r and the affrighted natives of Sierra Leone. We now proceeded to St Helena, and visited the residence in which Napoleon died. I was, as we all were, much hurt on finding the neglected state of the building, and of the room in which that great man breathed his last. It was filled with broken agricultural tools and farmyard rubbish; and in the small chamber in which he had described to Montholon how kingdoms were lost and won, cackling poultry were brooding; and that small garden, in which he had spent so many weary hours, trying to dig away the cankering sorrows of his troubled life, was overrun with weeds and scarred with poultry scrabbings. And so these small, unplastered, half-raftered rooms were the meshes of the net which had held the man-slayer of Europe; and this little plot of ground, scarce larger than a Cockney’s flower-bed, all that remained to him who had given realms away! The contrast was too great. There was something that clashed harshly somewhere, and I could not help thinking that posterity would lay this woful wreck to England’s charge. CHAPTER III. ARRIVE AT THE CAPE--VALUABLE ASSISTANCE FROM LOCAL AUTHORITIES--A CORPS OF VOLUNTEERS FORMED--GENERAL SIR HARRY SMITH’S DIFFICULTIES--DAMAGED STATE OF STORES AND AMMUNITION--OBLIGED TO INVENT A MINIE BALL--HAPPY JACK--THE COMPOSITION OF THE CORPS--REFLECTIONS--COLONEL NEVILLE CHAMBERLAIN--HIS PRESENT OF A SWORD AND ITS SUBSEQUENT HISTORY IN TURKEY.