From time to time he had been out to ply his telescope upon the fleet and upon the army. He knew that all the American camps had been established beyond the reach of any guns in the city fortifications, and he had watched with intense interest the slow, sure processes of a regular siege, conducted by a rarely capable general. He had seen the erection of battery after battery, of which General Scott's artillerymen were as yet making hardly any apparent use. He did not quite understand that, in merely being there, more and more of them, those batteries were already capturing the city. They were sending so few shots at the walls, or even at the grim Castle of San Juan de Ulua, because the American general wished to take Vera Cruz without bloodshed, if he could, and he came very near to the accomplishment of his humane purpose. Undoubtedly, he would have succeeded in starving out the city, if he, too, had not received daily notice of the nearer approach of Santa Anna and all the forces which he could gather. Nobody but that general himself and his confidential officers knew how really few they were, or how unfit to assail the Americans in their fortified camps on the shore of the sea. So, a final day came when the surrender of Vera Cruz was formally demanded, under the awful penalty of a general bombardment by the American fleet and army in case of a refusal. Resistance, it was declared, was now hopeless, and there was no military necessity for killing anybody. General Morales sent back a positive rejection, for he still entertained a faint hope of the timely arrival of assistance, and he did not inform General Scott how sadly he had failed in all his attempts to obtain supplies for the inhabitants and his army. Famine was already beginning to threaten all of the poorer classes who had neglected their opportunities to leave the city, or who had been unable to do so. As for Ned Crawford's provisions, he had continued to board with Anita, or with any mess of military men among whom he might happen to be. He had made many acquaintances, and he had found the ragged, unpaid, illiterate Mexican soldiers a genuinely hospitable lot of patriotic fellows. He came to his supper somewhat late on the evening of March 21st, and that night, after going to care for his pony, he came back and slept on a blanket on the floor of Anita's kitchen. On the morning of the 22d, he had but just walked out into the street when suddenly all the air around him seemed to be full of thunder. Roar followed roar, and peal followed peal, and then he heard affrighted shrieks in all directions. The bombardment had begun! "O Madre de Dios!" moaned the voice of poor Anita behind him. "O Senor Carfora! We shall all be killed! What shall we do? Oh, the wicked gringos! What did they come here for? I never did them any harm."