The frightful and oppressive stench of the partially-buried slain that lay before the stockade was not the least of my troubles; for in some of the places I had crept over, the men of Ramsay and of Hepburn were interred only a foot deep; and where the rain had washed away the soil, their toes and fingers, and more horrible still, their white skulls and ghastly teeth, were visible among the soft mould and sprouting grass! I crept through a small aperture formed by some chance bullet in the stockade, and drawing my ladder after me reached the edge of the fosse that engirt the bastion; and now I could perceive that the dark figures of the four sentinels had disappeared; they had withdrawn to their stone turrets, one of which terminated each angle of the ravelin. Still crawling serpentwise, I dropped my ladder into the fosse, (which on my side was only twelve feet deep,) and descending crossed it, over splinters of fallen masonry and exploded shells. Placing the ladder against the sloping face of the bastion, which was sixteen feet in height, I easily reached the stone cordon that girdled it, and from thence, all wet and slippery though it was, by the drenching rain, I swung myself up to the cope; but not daring to cross it erect, I crept inwards, keeping close alongside the nearest cannon, and at length stood _within_ the parapet of the dreaded Bastion de Louise! My heart leaped within me! The rain was still pouring downward or aslant as the gusts blew it; not a sentinel was visible; each was in his box, or stone turret, within a pistol shot of me, but the bellowing wind, and the rain that smoked along the parapet, and bubbled in the gorged gutters, concealed every sound, and with my spike nails and hammer (the face of which I had carefully covered with thick leather to preclude the faintest sound of _clinking_) I proceeded at once to remove the leaden aprons from the touch-holes, and to complete my dangerous task, by crawling from gun to gun, and keeping my figure as much as possible below the upper line of the parapet--a precaution almost needless, as the darkness was so great. I had spiked four culverins, when suddenly a light flashed along the wet and shining pavement, and two dark figures drew near me. My pulses stood still--but relinquishing my hammer for a pistol, with the resolution to sell my poor life dearly and desperately, I shrank close under a gun-carriage and lay _en perdu_, while two officers, cloaked and helmeted, evidently making a nightly round, passed within a yard of me, responding to the challenges of the various sentinels. One was undoubtedly the Prince of Vaudemont; and the other, who bore the lantern, I discovered in a moment to be my acquaintance the Chevalier d'Ische. 'So M. le Governeur, you will only let him have this place as a pile of ruins,' said the Prince as they passed; but I did not hear the reply. 'Good,' said the Prince again, 'but the vivres--'