Lady of Pity. . At the first gospel, the baby sighed.
At the second gospel, the baby rose up.]

The last is a verse out of a Corsican lullaby;
there is a soft, monotonous burden to the cradle
song:

     Quand enfin vous naquîtes
     On vous fit baptiser:
     La lune fut la marraine
     Et le soleil le parrain.
     Les étoiles qui étaient dans le ciel
     Avaient des colliers d'or.

[When at length you were born, they had you
baptised. The moon stood godmother, the sun was
godfather, and all the stars in heaven had golden
necklaces.]

TAPE AT THE HORSE GUARDS.

No country pays more liberally than England
for the clothing of its soldiers, but although the
English infantry soldier of to-day is, as to
clothing, twice the man he was only ten years
ago, still ours is, in that respect, nearly the least
effective army left in Europe. This may seem
the more extraordinary when we observe that,
with very few exceptions, our volunteer corps
have adopted uniforms perfectly suitable for
campaigning work; so that the spirit of
persistence in old blunders is certainly not national,
but is of the Horse Guards, local, and only of
the old school military.

We have but to visit Paris and see at what
distance Napoleon the Third has left us behind,
by the improvements he has lately made in the
dress of his infantry. In Italy, the same alterations
for the better are visible in the equipment
of the troops of every arm, whilst even
in Prussia and Austria, wherever it is found
that any change in clothing increases either
the comfort or the efficiency of the soldier, such
change is immediately adopted. In England
alone, the military authorities as a body—in
spite even of better enlightenment in their
highest chiefs—resist a full reform of soldiers'
dress.

It was my lot to serve in an English
regiment—some sixteen years in India, and
although I went through four campaigns and
was many times in action, I saw more men
injured and killed by bad and unsuitable clothing,
than by the bullets of the enemy. No weapon
of Affghan, Sikh, Burmese, or Pandy, has caused
the death of half so many men as that most
detestable instrument of destruction, the leather
stock has; nor, have the worst climates of the
East caused half the amount of fever that has
been engendered by the wretched garments
called great-coats, which were until very lately
issued to the army, and which, being of about
as much use as cloaks of brown paper, afforded
no protection whatever against the deadly night
dews of tropical countries. Let any man, even
in the best of health and the prime of life, try
one day's shooting, fishing, hunting, or walking
over plain ground, clad in a stiff shako with a
glazed top; a stock—no matter how soft the
material—round his neck; a tight fitting tunic
such as our troops now wear; sixty rounds of
ammunition slung over his shoulder and always
weighing, hanging, dangling, on the same spot
of his body, and he will have some idea of
the difficulties with which an English soldier
has to contend, even during a common field-day,
to say nothing of what he has to go through
during a campaign. Would any man in his
senses assume such a dress when about to
undergo physical exertion? I don't speak of
the colour or cut of the garments, but of
their ill-fitting, free-motion-hindering qualities,
even for the every-day business of life. Why,
then, should our troops be obliged to do their
work in such senseless and preposterous
uniforms? I am very far from advocating that
military clothing should be fashioned like the
garments of civil life, but I maintain that while
it is quite "soldierlike," it may be at the same
time easy to wear, and that the more it is made
with a view to giving the wearer free use of his
limbs, the more it will have of that "workmanlike"
character which every true soldier rejoices
to behold. The French have proved the truth
of this. The dress of their troops is easy
and comfortable: consequently their officers and
men look at all times as if they were ready to
take the field at a moment's notice. In the
English army our uniforms are so ungainly, stiff,
and uncomfortable, that our troops always give
one the idea of having only been got up for a
parade. With our neighbours the uniform is
made for the men; with us the men are delivered
over to the uniforms. A French officer finds his
dress so comfortable that he always wears it;
in the English army an officer discards it on
every possible occasion. Before our troops had
been a month in the Crimea, it became almost
impossible to know by his dress to what corps
—often to what branch of the service—an officer
belonged, so numerous were the make-shifts
substituted for parts of the regular uniform. The
reason for this was, that nearly every article of
regulation dress was found to be so utterly
unsuited to active service, that whatever an officer
could discard, he at once discarded, adopting as
a substitute the first thing that might come to
hand.

To begin with the head-dresses of our army.
Is there one of them, from the showy helmet of
the Life Guards to the hideous shako of the
line, which is in any way suited for campaigning,
or for active service? They are one and all too
high, too cumbersome, and far too easy to be
spoilt when knocked about in camp. Surely our
military hat-makers might invent some
modification of the cloth forage cap with peak, which
would serve all the required purposes of dress
and undress—something between the infantry
officer's cap as now worn, and the French well-
known "kepi." Elderly generals and colonels
might object to the change as not being
"dressy" enough, but the first real requisites
for soldiers' dress are that it shall be useful and
workmanlike. With these qualifications, and
perfect uniformity, a corps cannot help looking
soldierlike. A military cap should have two