One evening, about a week after the departure of the ladies, I was captain of the guard at the New Mole Fort, and Jack Slingsby was my subaltern. We had just finished the dinner which had been sent to us, hot and smoking, from the mess-house, in a conveyance for the purpose; the windows of the officers' guardroom were open, and with a box of contraband cigars, a few periodicals from the garrison library, a telescope to watch the passing ships, and a bottle or two of very choice mess claret, we were dozing the sunny evening of Andalusia very comfortably away.
The last dispatches from the Crimea had been read and discussed by us; the last lists of killed, wounded, frozen, or missing in the trenches had been conned over for some familiar name, which brought vividly before us some fine fellow we should never see again; but whose sudden fate was the more interesting to us, because it soon might be our own.
Whether it was the result of the good dinner, the good wine, the sultry atmosphere, or our own thoughts that oppressed us, I know not; but we sat long silent, and gazing at the varied scenery and glittering waters of the bay.
My thoughts were still wandering after Paulina, and I was endeavouring to imagine what she might be about at that precise moment.
Slingsby had lost a very heavy and very absurd bet, on an interesting race run at Grand Cairo between an Irish mare and an Arab horse belonging to Halim Pasha, when the former beat the latter "all to nothing," as Jack phrased it, and he had to hand over 500_l._ to Morton, our colonel, for booking on a horse which neither of them had ever seen. The same race was offered for the last two years against all England, for ten thousand sovereigns, and, as all the sporting world know, the challenge was not accepted. Blue-devilled by his loss, Jack Slingsby sipped his claret in silence and made wise resolutions which he never intended to keep, with moral reflections which he never could practise, and longed for the Crimea, insensible to the charms of this delightful climate, where, even in January, the narcissus-polyanthus hang in white clusters from the rocks; where the purple lavender flowers in large beds and parterres; where the palmetto spreads its fan-like foliage to the sun; where the gigantic aloe puts forth its leaves, and the prickly pear expands its ponderous bunches, while the wild tulip and the damascus-tree are in full blossom under the gloom of the solemn pine, or the lighter foliage of the cork-tree--and where all is verdure, fragrance, and joy! Yet, amid all this, Jack Slingsby, like the rest of "Ours," sighed for the frozen camp, the battered trenches, and the misery of Sebastopol.