vIt.] THE TWO ETONIANS. 343

 

a ‘bully’ at Eton, striking with hearty goodwill at
the savage foe. Too late, however, to save, he came
but to avenge the old officer, in whose body met the
bayonets of several foes even as Ethelston struck down
the first within his reach. The rest turned furiously
upon the new comer, and he and Moore found them-
selves instantly surrounded and exposed to a deadly
onslaught on each side. Determined to sell their
lives dearly, they stood back to back until a mound
of dead and dying around them testified to their
prowess and courage.

But what could two men do against the crowd
which pressed upon them? Their revolvers did their
work well, and right heavily did their swords fall upon
the servants of the Czar. But the tide of battle
rolled away from the battery, and at the spot where
most bodies of the dead were found, where the battle
had raged most fiercely, and the ground was trampled
and torn by the feet of hundreds of men struggling
for dear life, there lay the two Eton warriors side by
side.

Probably they had recognised each other, and had
had time to speak and to recall the past, for their
hands were clasped together as if in a parting grasp
of kindness and brotherhood. So it chanced that one
of the burying parties was led by an old Etonian who
had known the two, and he it was who found them as
TI have told. He it was, too, who witnessed the last
sad rites, when the bodies of the two school-com-
panions were laid in their resting place on ‘ Cathcart’s
Hill’ Together they died the death of the brave, and
together they rest, but their memory lives fresh in