Two batteries were thrown up during the night in a situation to enfilade and take in reverse the defences of the town. This in the loose sand was a most difficult work, and the fire of the enemy was directed with great precision to interrupt it; four sentinels were killed in succession through one loop-hole. The only eminence from whence artillery could be brought to bear directly on the town, though still about a hundred feet below it, was above the convent, and almost adjoining its walls. Here a battery was erected; the covered way to it passed through the convent, and the battery itself was constructed in a thickly-peopled burial-ground. A more ghastly circumstance can seldom have occurred in war; ... for coffins and corpses in all stages of decay were exposed when the soil was thrown up to form a defence against the fire from the town, and were used indeed in the defences; and when a shell burst there, it brought down the living and the dead together. An officer was giving his orders, when a shot struck the edge of the trenches above him; two coffins slipped down upon him with the sand, the coffins broke in their fall, the bodies rolled with him for some distance, and when he recovered he saw that they had been women of some rank, for they were richly attired in black velvet, and their long hair hung about their shoulders and their livid faces. The soldiers, in the scarcity of firewood, being nothing nice, broke up coffins for fuel with which to dress their food, leaving the bodies exposed; and till the hot sun had dried up these poor insulted remains of humanity, the stench was as dreadful as the sight. The village of S. Martin, or rather its ruins, were now occupied, and approaches were struck out there ♦THE BATTERIES OPEN.♦ to the right and left. On the 20th the batteries opened, and early in the evening the enemy abandoned the circular redoubt. The next day a flag of truce was sent with a summons to the governor, but not received. Meantime a parallel across the isthmus had been begun; in cutting it, the men came upon a channel level with the ground, in which a pipe was laid for conveying water into the town. The aqueduct was four feet high, and three feet wide. Lieutenant Reid of the engineers ventured to explore it, and at the end of 230 yards, he found it closed by a door in the counterscarp, opposite to the face of the right demi-bastion of the horn-work. It was thought that if a mine were formed at this point, the explosion would throw up earth enough against the escarp, which was only twenty-four feet high, to form a way over it; and accordingly sand-bags and barrels of powder were lodged there.