On the 6th of June the breach in Fort Christoval was reported practicable; it appeared to be so from the trenches; and at the following midnight a storming party of 180 men, conducted by Lieutenant Forster of the Royal Engineers, who had examined the breach the preceding night, moved towards it. The palisades had been destroyed by the battery; the counterscarp at that spot was only four feet deep; the advance, therefore, easily descended into the ditch and reached the foot of the breach, where they discovered that since evening closed the enemy had removed the rubbish, and that the escarp was standing clear nearly seven feet high. The advance, after it had in vain endeavoured to get over this obstacle, might have retired with little loss: but the main body had now entered the ditch; and in that spirit of mad courage which attempts impossible things, they tried with ladders fifteen feet long, which had been sent for mounting the breach with, to escalade the front scarp of the fort where it was twenty feet high; in this they persisted for an hour, while the garrison showered down upon them shells, stones, hand-grenades and combustibles at pleasure, and almost as a sport; nor did they retire till they had lost twelve killed and ninety wounded, more than two-thirds of their number, Forster being among the slain. Not disheartened by this, the besiegers renewed the attempt three nights after: they were provided with ladders of sufficient length; but the enemy were now on the alert, and had strongly garrisoned the fort: the officer who conducted the advance was killed on the glacis, and the officer in command immediately on descending into the ditch: and it could not be ascertained, from the report of the survivors, whether they had attempted a breach which, having, as on the former occasion, been cleared, had been rendered impracticable, or whether their efforts had been misdirected against the face of a demibastion which had been much injured, and might in the night easily be mistaken for a breach: but in one or other of these blind endeavours they persisted desperately under a tremendous shower of the most destructive missiles, till after an hour’s perseverance, when forty had been killed and an hundred wounded, the remainder were ordered to retire. ♦THE SIEGE RAISED.♦