The batteries—Stoical tranquillity in blasting rock—Round-hill or fourth parallel—State of the works—Siege materials and expedients—Corporal William Swann—Expedition to Kertch—Second international communication—No. 15 battery on the right—Rope mantlets—Hospital caves—Companies reviewed by General Jones—French officers’ opinion of the corps—Repairing right rifle pit—Arrival of ninth company—Progress of the works—Third bombardment—Bravery in the embrasures—Corporal Stanton in the batteries of the second parallel on the right attack—Casualties—First appearance of ninth company in the trenches—The sailors—Voluntary resolution of Corporal Lockwood and his sappers—The engineers—Inobtrusive devotion in an embrasure—Adam McKechnie—Death of Captain Dawson—Selection of old sappers for front duty; their sterling exertions—Labours in the batteries; platforms—Magazine blown up—Russian plan of extending their trenches—Capture of the quarries and white works—-The lodgment—Death of Lieutenant Lowry; bravery of corporal Stanton—Casualties—Lord Raglan’s approbation of the sappers—Infernal machines in the quarries. By the 16th May all the batteries as far as No. 14 on the right, and Nos. 10 and 11 on the left, were finished and provided with pieces of heavy artillery. No. 14, founded on a bed of rock, was strongly built in the centre of the second parallel, and the cheeks of its embrasures, formed in the ordinary way with gabions and sand-bags, were lined with hide-bags. No. 10 was partly revetted with stones; and No. 11, from the hard nature of the ground, occasioned considerable difficulty in its construction, inasmuch as mining—a tedious operation under fire—was constantly resorted to to procure cover. It was chiefly revetted with casks and gabions. The two latter batteries were also built in the second parallel, the former to fight the barrack battery, and the latter, rising from a trench which run out at right angles from a backward bend of the parallel to the crest of a precipitous cliff, raked the Picket-House ravine and the cemetery, and plunged its shells into the works at the dock-yard creek.