should sacrifice to personal objects the very means provided to give efficiency and success to the operations for defending them! On the night of the 11th no working party was provided the weather being fearfully stormy. There were, however, 24 sappers, heavily clothed in long boots, overcoats, and waterproofs, dispersed in the right trenches under Lieutenant Graves of the engineers, who worked through the darkness unsheltered from the rain. One brigade was extended in the new communication on the right, in front of No. 8 mortar battery, blasting the rock and building the loosened boulders into the parapet; another brigade was in No. 14 battery, attending to the magazines and embrasures and clearing the choked-up channels for the passage of the water into the ravine. Eight carpenters were engaged for awhile in laying platforms in No. 12 battery, but the rain fell with such heaviness, that the spaces prepared to receive the sleepers were soon inundated. In this extremity the men made furrows in the sloughy ground, and thus drained the sites to permit them, when the storm should abate, to resume their tasks. Nothing, it would seem, was enough to induce the Russians to seek repose; rather, indeed, the presence of storms, the more angry the better, whetted their spirit for activity and assault. Two hours before midnight they opened a sharp fire of musketry, accompanied by a cannonading of shells upon our works, which was stoutly met by incessant volleys from the guard of the trenches and five guns in the 21-gun battery. On the left attack, where Captain Hassard was on duty, there were only four sappers to carry out his orders. But little could be expected from such initial means in such a supremely dismal night. In about two hours, however, under a constant torrent, they altered the flank embrasure of No. 8 battery, to enable its gun to play into the extreme Russian rifle-pit on the right. Just as they had finished, corporal Thomas Kirkwood, who had subordinate charge of the party, heard the bustle of an approaching sortie. Communicating the intelligence to his officer, Captain Hassard flew through the zig-zags and parallels and had the guard of the trenches in readiness to meet it. This was barely accomplished when the enemy tore up the hill from the rifle-screens in the Woronzoff ravine. Now they were near the parapet, and about to enter at its most accessible points; but so close and prompt was the resistance they received from the works that a hasty retreat was the consequence. Light balls, thrown from a Cohorn mortar in No. 7 battery, discovered a second column pressing to the centre of the advanced parallel. A few, more daring than the rest, even jumped into the trenches; but the vigour of the besiegers pushed back the assault with severe loss to the enemy. No. 1 battery opened on the quarries, No. 2 on the Redan, and some effective rounds were fired from the flank gun of No. 8 battery by Captain Collingwood Dickson of the artillery.