In the morning, when we were engaged in cooking our breakfasts, master, making what fires we could with the withered leaves of the date-tree, our colonel and two officers came up to us. The colonel was an Englishman--as brave a gentleman as ever lived--ay, and as kind an officer, too. He was a fine-looking old man, as tall as Bill, and as well built, too; but his health was much broken; it was said he had entered the army out of break-heart on losing his wife. Well, he came up to us, and shook Bill by the hand, as cordially as if he had been a colonel like himself. He was a brave, good soldier, he said, and, to show him how much he valued good men, he had come to make him a sergeant, in room of the one we had lost. He had heard he was a scholar, he said, and he trusted his conduct would not disgrace the halberd. Bill, you may be sure, thanked the colonel, and thanked him, master, very like a gentleman; and, that very day, he swaggered scarlet and a sword, as pretty a sergeant as the army could boast of--ay, and for that matter, though his experience was little, as fit for his place. For the first fortnight, we didn't eat the king's biscuit for nothing. We had terrible hard fighting on the 13th; and, had not our ammunition failed us, we would have beaten the enemy all to rags; but, for the last two hours, we hadn't a shot, and stood just like so many targets set up to be fired at. I was never more vexed in my life, than when I saw my comrades falling round me; and all for nothing. Not only could I see them falling; but in the absence of every other noise--for we had ceased to cheer, and stood as silent and as hard as foxes--I could hear the dull, hollow sound of the shot, as it pierced them through. Sometimes the bullets struck the sand, and then rose and went rolling over the level, raising clouds of dust at every skip. At times, we could see them coming through the air like little clouds, and singing all the way as they came. But it was the frightful smoking shot that annoyed us most; these horrid shells. Sometimes, they broke over our heads in the air, as if a cannon charged with grape had been fired at us from out the clouds; at times, they sank into the sand at our feet, and then burst up like so many Vesuviuses, giving at once death and burial to hundreds. But we stood our ground, and the day passed. I remember we got, towards evening, into a snug hollow between two sandhills, where the shot skimmed over us, not two feet above our heads; but two feet is just as good as twenty, master; and I began to think, for the first time, that I hadn't got a smoke all day. I snapped my musket, and lighted my pipe, and Bill, whom I hadn't seen since the day after the landing, came up to share with me.