the command respectively of General Feray and Colonel Paiiby in the plain on their left. This force remained inactive until, the Russian outposts having fallen back as the Turks advanced, the latter had taken possession of Kamara, when the cavalry and artillery advanced to the other hillocks of the ridge on which the village is situated, and the whole of the troops marched towards the river. On this side of it, on a height overlooking Tchorgoun, they found a post of Cossacks, who, speedily dislodged by a well-directed fire of rockets from the French, retired precipitately to the other side, where a small force with four guns only was visible. Omar Pasha did not think it desirable to move across the river, but withdrew after he had satisfied himself that the enemy were not in strength, and the troops returned to their camps, the infantry covered by the cavalry and artillery. This movement did not lead to any consequences of importance, and shortly afterwards Omar Pasha and the larger portion of his troops returned to Eupatoria, which was supposed to be threatened with an attack; but it gave the Turks an opportunity of displaying to their allies the high state of steadiness and efficiency to which they had been brought, and to many of our officers it affi>rded an escape from the wearisome routine of the camp, and the agreeable exchange of the stagnant atmosphere and unbroken sterility of the plateau, for the pure breezes and the luxuriant vegetation of tlie valleys lying between it and the Tchernaya. " Every one," says Mr. Russell, " felt as if he had beaten the Cossacks and got out of prison at last, and I never saw more cheering joyous faces at a cover-side than were to be seen at Canrobert's Hill. It was a fillip to our spirits to get a gallop across the greensward once more, and to escape from the hateful feeling of constraint and confinement which bores us to death in the camp."
Perhaps the most striking incident of the reconnaissance was when the squadrons of the English Heavy Cavalry Brigade, accompanied by the 10th Hussars, who had lately arrived from India, and whose bronzed manly faces, soldierlike bearing, picturesque yet serviceable uniform, and Arab horses, remarkable for fire and beauty, combined to form the very ideal of a nation's chivalry, passed over the fatal plain for ever memorable as the scene of the Light Cavalry charge on the 25th of October, 1854. The ground still presented traces of the unequal but glorious struggle — ever and anon half hidden by the long rank grass, or emerging in ghastly conti-ast from thick beds of sweet and exquisite wild-flowers, whose every petal spoke of teeming life and beauty, death's most hideous emblem, a human skeleton, decked as in mockery with a few patches of red or grey cloth, which alone distinguished it as friend's or foe's, by its dread presence rebuked the gorgeous pageant flaunting by in seeming oblivion of a past so recent and so mournful, and of the stern interpretation put by such a past on such a present — oblivion that was but seeming, for who can tell what bitter memories of their heroic and self-doomed comrades, what unuttered longings for a speedy day and a fairer field on which to that legacy of glory and of sorrow they might add a page all glory, lurked unseen beneath helmet and cuirass, as the heavy cavalry rode amidst the tokens of the strife which told too plainly the fate of the " six hundred," or crushed beneath their horse-hoofs the gentle flowers which clothed their undistinguished graves? May this knowledge be for ever buried in their own bosoms, and may Peace yet teach them the softer lessons wliich even a scene like this may convey, and so humanity be spared the fearful reckoning which would be exacted were the dearest wish of their hearts realised, and it were given them to meet but once the squadrons of Russia and to close with them in the shock of mortal combat!
The closing days of April were chiefly remarkable for the gradual dying out of the second bombardment, for another sharp affair between the French and Russians in front of the Bastion du Mat, and for a review of the French troops on an extended scale held by General Canrobert, when he took occasion to impress, in a very emphatic manner, upon his officers the invincible resolution on the part of France and England to have Sebastopol sooner or later, and at whatever cost. On the 25th some curiosity and interest were excited in the camp by the arrival of Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, the English Ambassador to the Sublime Porte, who with his family remained for more than a week at the theatre of operations.