stealthy meetings in public-house parlours, bandying of passwords from
mouth to mouth, and many other signs which made their officers right
glad when the order came which sent them to foreign, and better still,
to active service.

For Irish regiments have before now been disaffected, and have at a
distance looked upon the foe as though he might, in truth, be the
friend; but when they have been put face on to him, and when their
officers have dashed to the front with a wave and halloo, those rebel
hearts have softened and their gallant Celtic blood has boiled with the
mad Joy of the fight, until the slower Britons have marvelled that they
ever could have doubted the loyalty of their Irish comrades. So it
would be again, according to the officers, and so it would not be if
Dennis Conolly and a few others could have their way.

It was a March morning upon the eastern fringe of the Nubian desert.
The sun had not yet risen, but a tinge of pink flushed up as far as the
cloudless zenith, and the long strip of sea lay like a rosy ribbon
across the horizon. From the coast inland stretched dreary sand-plains,
dotted over with thick clumps at mimosa scrub and mottled patches of
thorny bush. No tree broke the monotony of that vast desert. The dull,
dusty hue of the thickets, and the yellow glare of the sand, were the
only colours, save at one point, where, from a distance, it seemed that
a land-slip of snow-white stones had shot itself across a low foot-hill.
But as the traveller approached he saw, with a thrill, that these were
no stones, but the bleaching bones of a slaughtered army. With its dull
tints, its gnarled, viprous bushes, its arid, barren soil, and this
death streak trailed across it, it was indeed a nightmare country.

Some eight or ten miles inland the rolling plain curved upwards with a