The engineer Burgoyne, directing the siege, commenced a battery two hundred and fifty yards from Vincente, and as the ruins of convents all around which had been destroyed to make the forts, rendered it impossible to excavate, earth was brought from a distance; but the moon was up, the night short, the French musketry heavy, the sixth division inexperienced, and at daybreak the battery was still imperfect. An attempt had been made to attach the miner secretly to the counterscarp, but the vigilance of a trained dog baffled this design: it was then openly made, yet defeated by a plunging fire from the top of the convent. On the 18th eight hundred Germans, placed in the ruins, mastered all the enemy’s fire save that from loop-holes, and two field-pieces were placed on a neighbouring convent to silence the French artillery, but failed. In the night the first battery was armed; at daybreak on the 19th seven guns opened, and by nine o’clock the wall of the convent was cut away to the level of the rampart; a second breaching battery of iron howitzers, which saw lower down the scarp, then commenced its fire, but that ordnance was unmeet for battering, and the enemy’s musketry brought down a captain and more than twenty gunners. The 20th Colonel Dickson arrived with more iron howitzers from Elvas, and the second battery, reinforced with additional pieces, revived its fire, striking only the convent, a huge cantle of which came to the ground, crushing many of the garrison and laying bare the inside of the building; carcasses were immediately thrown into the opening, but the enemy extinguished the flames. A lieutenant and fifteen gunners were lost this day, ammunition failed, and the attack was suspended.