And now commenced to our brethren and sisters a period of unspeakable woe; the ante-chamber of ruin; the penultimate syllable of their dismal story. After the destruction of the thatched barrack, dearth of house-room forced two hundred of our women and children to spend twelve days of twice twelve hours without ceiling over head or flooring under foot. At night they lay on the bare ground, exposed to every noxious influence and exhalation that was abroad in the air; and in the morning they rose, those among them who rose at all, to endure, bareheaded often, and always roofless, the blazing fury of the tropical beams. The men off guard attempted to contrive for them a partial protection, by stretching canvas screens across a framework of muskets and poles; but these canopies were soon fired by the rebel shells, and the poor creatures were reduced to cower beneath the shelter of our earthwork, feebly chasing the shadow thrown by the sun as he rose and set. It is impossible for a home-staying Englishman to realize the true character of the great troubles in 1857, unless he constantly bears in mind that all which he reads was devised, and done, and endured beneath the vertical rays of an Eastern summer, and in a temperature varying from a hundred and twenty to a hundred and thirty-eight degrees in the shade. If there are any whose experience of heat is limited to a field-day at Wimbledon in the month of August, or to a tramp over Norfolk stubbles when the dogs are too thirsty to work, and the boy has carried off the beer to the wrong spinney, they will obtain a more just notion from a sad tale simply told than from pages of unscientific rhetoric.