It is the Crimea, children, and the Crimea on a broiling, stifling August day.

At the present time when we speak and think of that dreadful war and the sufferings it entailed, it is above all the _winters_ there that we recall with the greatest horror--those terrible 'Crimean winters.' But those who went through it all have often assured me that the miseries of the summers--of some part of them at least--were in their way quite as great, or worse.

What could be much worse?
The suffocating heat; the absence, or almost total absence, of shade; the dust and the dirt, and the poisonous flies; the foul water and half-putrid food?
Bad for the sound ones, or those as yet so--and oh, how intolerably dreadful for the sick! "'What could be much worse ?' thought Jack Berkeley to himself, as after a long killing spell in the trenches he at last got back to his tent for a few hours' rest.
"'My own mother wouldn't know me,' he said to himself, as out of a sort of half melancholy mischief he glanced at his face in the little bit of cracked looking-glass which was all he had to adorn himself by.

He was feeling utterly worn out and depressed--so many of his friends and companions were dead or dying--knocked down at that time quite as much by disease as by Russian bullets--in many cases the more terrible death of the two.

And things in general were looking black.