To be a little precise, let a survey of their engagements be undertaken. Look first among the embrasures, and there, ant-like, is seen an isolated red-coat coolly pegging up hides or fixing gabions, while two or three carpenters, with upturned sleeves, are discovered crouching low, fixing platforms or renewing sleepers and fighting bolts. Go next to the caves and call—“Sapper?” One immediately emerges from its murkiness, spade in hand, with begrimed face and dishevelled beard, to show the quality of his exertions. Step to the saps right and left, and in each on bended knee with whirling pick and cap well down is traced the sapper. To his sturdy efforts the earth yields and the gabion soon is filled. Watch him as he goes ahead with cautious crawl and daringly places another basket on the line. How many rifle balls, how many shots fly past, few can tell; but on he urges as if nothing had occurred, and perhaps the next discharge kills him. Steal now along the trench to its advanced limit, and there is seen a group of busy miners black with gunpowder in shallow depths, blasting the rock to deepen the approach and strengthen the cover. How well they know their art. Not a head is seen above the young parapet and scarcely that of a hammer; but when a strong blow is required, up it goes and the sun sparkling on the burnished steel gives a mark to the enemy. Bullets from the screens are quickly fired and an occasional shot trundles in among them, but undauntedly they proceed, watchful as dogs, till at last the mine explodes. A volume of vapour affords another indication of their activity to the enemy. Shot and shell plunge on and tear up the ground, but the miners have flown to a distance and quietly await the cessation of the fire to resume their tasks. Walk over to the sailors’ battery where surely none but seamen may be seen. There, in truth, the blue jackets are in droves with their droll sayings and unsteady gait; but press forward. “Is that a marine?” “No, it’s a sapper trimming the parapet.” There, too, is another tricing up the flaccid cheeks of an embrasure; and beyond is a third giving position to platforms for sea-service mortars or naval guns. Go round that traverse: the universal man is there completing it; another is strengthening the parapet; another repairing the merlon; a fourth is in the right epaulment; a fifth in the left; a sixth is elsewhere constructing loopholes with barrels; others are revetting the works with tubs, casks, gabions, and hide-bags, while a couple of broad-backed miners are burrowing underground and driving a tunnel into the jaws of some convenient cavern. The tour is incomplete without a visit to the pits. Come with the night relief and see them. Jump into that screen; there again is the sapper enlarging loopholes or picking the rock to sink the pit. Plunge into the next one: there too is the military Tonson improving the cover with stones while the eager riflemen jostle him as they press forward to