I usually wear, which I leave to poor Annie Blake. Her address is High Street, Little Petherington. And I hereby appoint you the executor of this my last will and testament.
"Herbert Redfern,
"Capt., H.M. 16th Lancers."
The Crimean war was at an end, and the troops were on their way home again. Thinned and shattered as they were, they yet sufficed to afford evidence of the noble stuff they had left behind them on Cathcart's Hill, and in the Valley of the Shadow of Death. As they marched through great towns in their tattered uniform, with bearskins and shakoes half shot away, their faces bronzed, and covered with ragged beard; and, above all, their colours shot off almost to the pole, carried by dirty ragged lads, who still somehow looked like gentlemen—lads who had already seen more misery and sickness in their young lives of twenty summers than the oldest spectator in the enthusiastic throng of spectators that gathered to welcome the old troops home again—as these sturdy warriors tramped through the English towns they had little expected to see again, women went into hysterics, and strong men, after shouting themselves hoarse with a kind of mad welcome that let itself go free to take what form it would, threw themselves down upon the grass, and there lay prone, and wept like women. For each man who saw a brother, or a friend, in those thinned and broken ranks, saw one he had hardly reckoned on ever seeing again; and be who counted no personal friends or relations
