[W]hile I was learning the Latin grammar, I learnt other things besides, of more use than the construction of any languages, living or dead. First, I… - Henry Kingsley

I kenned yer partner: a good man—a very good man, a man o' ten thousand. He was put down up north. A bad job—a very bad job! Ye gat terrible vengeance, though. Ye hewed Agag in pieces! T' Governor up there to Sydney was wild angry at what ye did, but he darena' say much. He knew that every free man's heart went with ye. It were the sword of the Lord and of Gideon that ye fought with! Ye saved many good lives by that raid of yours after Stockbridge was killed. The devils wanted a lesson, and ye gar'd them read one wi' a vengeance!

Oh, but the sabres bit deep that autumn afternoon! There were women in Minsk, in Moglef, in Tohernigof, in Jitenier, in Polemva, whose husbands were Hussars—and women in Taganrog, in Tcherkask, in Aarepta, which lies under the pleasant slate mountains, whose husbands and sons were Cossacks—who were made widows that day. For that day's work there was weeping in reed-thatched hovels of the Don, and the mud-built shanties of the Dnieper. For the 17th Lancers, the Scots-Greys, the 1st Royals, and the 6th Enniskillens—"these terrible beef-fed islanders" (to use the words of the Northern Bee)—were upon them; and Volnyia and Hampshire, Renfrewshire and Grodno, Podolia and Fermanagh, were mixed together in one common ruin. Still, they say, the Princess Petrovitch, on certain days, leaves her carriage, and walks a mile through the snow barefoot, into Alexandroski, in memory of her light-haired handsome young son, whom Hornby slew at Balaclava. And I myself know the place where Lady Allerton makes her pilgrimage for those two merry boys of hers who lie out on the Crimean hill. Alas! not side by side. Up and down, in all weathers, along a certain gravel walk, where the chalk brook, having flooded the park with its dammed-up waters, comes foaming and spouting over a cascade, and hurries past the smooth-mown lawns of the pleasance. In the very place where she stood when the second letter came. And there, they say, she will walk at times, until her beauty and her strength are gone, and her limbs refuse to carry her.

A new heaven and a new earth! Tier beyond tier, height above height, the great wooded ranges go rolling away westward, till on the lofty sky-line they are crowned with a gleam of everlasting snow. To the eastward they sink down, breaking into isolated forests, fringed peaks, and rock-crowned eminences, till with rapidly straightening lines they disappear gradually into broad grey plains, beyond which the Southern Ocean is visible by the white reflection cast upon the sky.