This is a scene of tranquU beauty and repose, heightened rather than diminished by the evidences everywhere presented to the eye that here, as all around. War claims the landscape as his own. The lazy stream of the Tchernaya creeping into the blue placid waters of the bay; the rounded outlines o^ the hills, stretching away in gentle undulations to the horizon; the passing shower over Inkermann East Lighthouse, and which, with a few fleecy clouds, breaks up and relieves the monotony of the azure vault; — all these are contrasted, and yet blended, with the harder forms of batteries and earthworks, and with the picturesque yet significant puffs of whitest smoke which issue here and there from their guns. The most important of these works, at the time of the execution of the drawing, was the New Mortar Battery, on the extreme right, which it was supposed would destroy not only the Lighthouse Batteries, but the shipping in the harbour. The latter portion of the task has been fully accomplished, though by other means; and perhaps the principal interest of the picture now attaches to the rapprochement of the English works of attack and the Russian batteries on the north side of the harbour, which have afforded a temporary and precarious shelter to the vanquished defenders of the town. Three of these are here shown; namely, two on the left, close to Inkermann West Lighthouse, and a third on the hill in the centre; but the chain of defences is prolonged westward till they terminate at Fort Constantine.
The Tchernaya, or black water, derives its name from the sluggish character of its current — the Orientals, both Turks and Russians, being accustomed to denominate all slow and turbid streams black, while those which flow rapidly are called white. When Dr. Koch visited Sebastopol, he rowed up the Tchernaya, which he found near its mouth fully deserving of its name, as he states it to have been filled with muddy, marshy water, and choked up with reeds and various aquatic plants. The desperate conflict of the 16th of August, in which the Russians displayed more than their usual obstinacy and contempt of death, charged the dull colour of the waters with the bright red hues of human blood, and impeded the course of the current with the innumerable corpses of the devoted men whom the fierce legions of Gaul hurled back into the river from their vain and fruitless attack.
GRAVES AT THE HEAD OF THE HARBOUR OF BALAKLAVA.
War has its victims other than those who perish by the sword and bullet; fever and cholera are ever in its train, and not unfrequently carry off those whose vocation is not in the battle-field, for whom alive there are no laurels, and dead no glory. At Balaklava there are many graves whose tenants were of this class, men who perished at their post and in the faithful discharge of their duty, and who sacrificed their lives to their country as surely and not less heroically than the soldier who falls at the summit of the breach he has mounted, and with the shout of victory ringing in his ears. A few.of these narrow resting-places arc marked by unpretending head-stones, with a brief and simple inscription, but the majority are undistinguished, save in the memory of those who mourn their occupiers. It is at the funeral of one of the humbler of those whose remains lie thickly around, close to the cahn basin whose waters are crowded with so many evidences of activity and life, that we are here invited to attend. The body of a sailor from one of the ships in the harbour has just been consigned to the earth, and, as the clergyman with bare head reads the impressive and pathetic burial service of the Church, the rough and often thoughtless children of the deep, \yhose hands have fashioned the grave to Avhich they have borne their comrade, listen with bowed heads and with mingled feelings of reverence and sorrow to the solemn teachings of the holy rite. They think with full hearts of him who is gone from among them, whose earthly voyages are for ever ended, and who has attained the last and surest haven from the storms and shipwreck of the troubled sea of life. Or they muse, perhaps, on the fate which has laid him under a hostile soil and in a foreign land, far from the quiet village home and the peaceful churchyard, under whose green turf he may have fondly dreamed to seek repose in the evening of his days. Meanwhile the ceaselesa bustle of the road hard by goes on, uninterrupted for a moment even by a scene like this; the living stream of energy and hope flows on careless of the dead who so near