shape of that pair of horns, which, with his card attached, came to me by express. I had them mounted on the shield, and put that plate upon them, partly because they recall rather an odd experience, and partly to keep myself in mind that the war is over."

"Now, that's quite a story," said Kenryck, as the colonel paused. "I should think, though, that you would keep the horns at home. They are a splendid pair, and the story makes them doubly valuable."

"I had them in my hall for years," said the colonel, "but when we set out to fit up The Battery here, I chipped them in as part of my contribution, for that space of wall, in there between the colors, seemed made on purpose for them. But those antlers are not my only reminder of Pender's gratitude," he continued, taking out his pocket-book and extracting from it a photograph of a bald-headed, pudgy-faced infant, "for here's a picture of a young Liverpool citizen who rejoices in the name of Henry Elliott Pender. He's Pender's third, and he's bound to grow up into a terrible little rebel, for his father is still unreconstructed. Doesn't look very formidable, does he? I'm ready, though, to bet my commission against a corporal's warrant that, one of these days, I'll have a namesake in either Her Majesty's army or navy, for the little rascal comes of fighting stock, and blood will tell."

"Apparently the doctor didn't have a grudge to settle," said Kenryck, handing back the photograph. Then, after disposing of what little beer was left in his pewter, he got upon his feet, saying, "Well, Colonel, I hope I'll have the luck to get up here often, for I want to hear the stories that go with the rest of these odds and ends."

"Hello!" said Colonel Elliott, glancing at the clock. "Is it so late as that! Trust I've not bored you; you're too good a listener to frighten away."

Kenryck went to rescue his overcoat from the fast diminishing pile upon the chair, while the colonel, pipe in hand, took up a position near the door, to bid good-night to our departing guests. By twos and threes our visitors left us, and then the colonel, as the last descending footfall echoed faintly up the long staircase, turned and glanced at the disorderly array of empty mugs. "I venture to assert," he said, with a laugh, "that there are worse places for story-telling than The Battery. Judging by appearances, I think it doubtful if there's been a dry yarn told to-night, up here."

"Twenty-two, twenty-four, twenty-six," counted Sam, as he made the rounds of the deserted tables. "Twenty-six mugs t' clean an' shine up! Wal, 'twan't sich a bad evenin' a'ter all." And we left him gathering up the tarnished pewters, and swearing strange, New England oaths—"B'gosh!" and "I swan!" and "Gol darn!"—at the prospect of the morrow's polishing.

ONE RECORD
ON THE
REGIMENTAL ROLLS

ONE RECORD
ON THE
REGIMENTAL ROLLS.

"Very pretty," said the colonel, "very pretty, indeed. Quite up to our standard, eh, Jack? Guard looks small, though,—doesn't it?—to one who's used to seeing twenty-four files paraded." The colonel and I had got leave for a couple of weeks to run down to Old Point to see the heavy gun practice, and now we stood watching the new guard as it marched away to relieve the old details.

Yes, it was pretty, all of it,—very pretty indeed,—and I felt repaid for the early breakfast we had taken in order to get over to the fort in time for the ceremony. The surroundings made a fitting frame for the picture: before us lay the broad, green floor of the level parade, its carpet of short-cropped turf still glistening with the morning dew; the angular lines of the great, ungainly barracks somehow looked less harsh in the warm sunshine; and the officers' quarters, half hidden beneath the scrubby oaks and overhanging willows, looked cosey and comfortable—and almost too homelike for such a place.

While the gray, sod-capped walls of the old fort still were ringing with the quickstep played by the four smart trumpeters who led the guard in its march, we turned and left the parade, loitering for a moment at the place where the old guns—relics of Yorktown, Saratoga, and many another by-gone siege and battle—lie sullen and dumb, while the green mould of long years gathers ever more thickly upon cascabel, chase, and trunnion. "Back numbers," said the colonel, half to himself, as he stooped to read the inscription deeply graven in the metal of an old field-piece, "back numbers, all of them. 'Captured at Yorktown'—and that was more than a hundred years ago! Well, those who won and those who lost are under ground now, and the old gun's dead, too. It has said its last word."

We sauntered away, through the echoing archway, and across the drawbridge which spans the green and quiet water of the wide ditch; and as we slowly walked past the water battery, with its long row of grim, black Rodmans frowning out upon the bay—each in its vaulted casemate—like so many kennelled watch-dogs, the colonel broke the silence with, "Do you know, Jack, I don't care particularly about watching the firing to-day? The pounding we got yesterday was infernal. I hope this country can steer clear of war until we've perfected the pneumatic gun."

"Well, I don't know," said I. "Wouldn't that seem too much like fighting with bean-blowers?"

"It wouldn't much resemble the fighting in the old days—and that's a fact," replied the colonel, kicking into the ditch a pebble from the gravelled roadway, and smiling at the sudden scattering of a school of little fish, caused by the unexpected splash. "I'm not so sure, after all, that I'm in a hurry for the time to arrive when some fellow, ten miles or so away, can free a lot of compressed air, and by means of it drop half a barrel of dynamite in my vicinity—without even so much as a puff of smoke to show which way I ought to turn to bow my acknowledgments. I've an idea, old man, that a little occurrence of that sort would scatter even the gallant Third about as completely and expeditiously as my pebble disorganized those minnows."

A few steps more brought us beyond the last of the curving line of casemates, and as we turned towards the hotel the colonel said, "I feel that I'm growing old, for now-a-days even a little heavy gun firing makes my ears ache, and anything over a little bores me. Thirty years ago I didn't mind it so much as I do now. Thirty years ago? Why, Jack, I can't realize it! But it must be that: yes, '61 from '91; that makes it—and it makes me an old man, too."

"Nonsense!" said I, laughing, for in all the Third there is no younger-hearted man than the colonel who commands it. "It makes you nothing of the sort. In '61 you were nineteen; add thirty to that—and it leaves you still on the sunny side of fifty. See here, Colonel; on our rolls we have seven hundred men, and some few over—how many are there among them who could down you to-day?"

"Not many, if I do say it," replied the colonel, with his usual modesty, drawing himself up and stretching out one long arm, to gaze contemplatively at the sinewy wrist and compact bunch of knuckles with which it terminated. "But all that only goes to show how well preserved I am, for I am an old man, in spite of what you say. Confound you, Jack! Can't you let a veteran have the