Wherever the Russians had established screens, they opened communications to them, and then connecting each with the other, so formed a parallel. One of this kind stretched its length 150 yards in front of the British trenches which was nightly strengthened, widened, and improved. The line, extending from the Mamelon to the Quarries, formed the enemy’s exterior defence, beyond which except the rifle-pits he was never able to advance. As the besiegers flung out their boyeaux and breasted them with batteries or filled them with sharp-shooters, the Russians, equally pushing, spent their arts and energies in rendering their works both formidable and inaccessible. This advanced parallel having greatly annoyed the besiegers and laid many a brave section low, a combined attack was determined on,—the French to assault the _Ouvrage Blancs_ and the Mamelon; the English, the Quarries and its appended works facing the left of the right attack. At about six in the evening—just as the sun was setting—the assault was made by half a battalion of infantry from the light and second divisions headed by Lieutenant Lowry of the engineers and a small party of royal sappers and miners. The whole were commanded by Colonel Shirley. Divided into two columns of 200 each, the half battalion dashed on to the flanks of the Quarries, and supported by a reserve of 600 men, fought nobly against odds which threatened to overwhelm them. A tremendous cannonade had swept the Quarries until a few minutes before the encounter, when all the batteries turned their venom on the Russian lines and broke them up one after another. Repelled once, the assailants soon recovered themselves and drove the Russians before them; but, contending against an enemy almost invincible, the stormers again and again were forced back. At this moment, Lieutenant-Colonel Tylden of the engineers, who had a working party of 800 men under his orders, let loose his armed pioneers, and three-fourths of them rushed into the quarries—those impregnable hollows, hemmed in by walls of rock and paved with broken stones and boulders—to share in the contest. This timely help, giving fresh vigour to the assault, the stormers, renewed in spirit, bravely seconded the stern efforts of the reinforcements; and a withering musketry, close and telling, struck down their antagonists to the earth, leaving chasms in their masses which a stream of troops from the Redan as quickly refilled. Swoop following swoop levelled section after section, succeeded by a temporary wavering which augured a retreat. The quivering, however, passed, and the enemy yet stood in the pits which so long had shielded them and worried the assailants as if the last man intended to die in the ambuscade. Already the immolation showed how desperate was the strife; the Russians at length, were well nigh exhausted; but a few minutes more, and the besiegers, struggling over the debris of old explosions and amid rocky traverses and huge fragments