Day after day, with little change of circumstance and little gain to either party, the siege continued throughout the months of November and December. At the end of the former, Pottinger wrote in his journal, “The Persians have wasted some thousand rounds of ammunition, and are not more advanced than when the firing commenced.” The dreaded artillery of Mahomed Shah was less formidable in reality than in the excited imaginations of the Heratees; and the besieged gathered new courage from the success of their resistance. The fire from the Persian batteries was irregular and spasmodic; sometimes maintained with exceeding spirit, and at others languid and uncertain. The round shot from the guns went over the batteries, often clearing the entire city, but sometimes falling within it. The vertical firing from the mortars told with better effect. The shells[157] were thrown less at random, and many houses were destroyed. The loss of life was not great in the city; but those domestic episodes of war, which give so painful an interest to the annals of an attack upon a fortified town, were not absent from the siege of Herat. In the next house to that in which Eldred Pottinger resided, a shell descended close to the spot on which an infant was sleeping. The terrified mother rushed between the deadly missile and her child. The shell exploding carried off her head; and the corpse of the mother fell upon the babe, and suffocated it. In the mean while, with a vigour and a constancy worthy of any garrison, in ancient or in modern times, the besieged continued to conduct their defensive operations. Three of the five gates of the city were kept open, and the communications with the surrounding country were preserved. The cattle were sent out to graze. Firewood and other commodities were brought into the city. Every night the garrison sallied out, attacked the working parties, carried off their tools, often destroyed their entrenchments, wounded and sometimes killed the workmen, and carried their bleeding heads, with barbarous triumph, into the city. Whilst the activity of the garrison thus sensibly increased, that of the besiegers was plainly declining. Throughout the month of December little progress was made. The fire of the Persian batteries slackened—sometimes altogether ceased. When it was most lively, it was wild and eccentric—so slovenly, indeed, as to warrant the belief that every gun was pointed in a different direction, and every gunner firing at some particular mark of his own. At last, on Christmas Day, when the siege had been continued for more than a month, Eldred Pottinger wrote in his journal, “I could not help recollecting the three shots a day which the Spanish army before Gibraltar fired for some time, and which the garrison called after the Trinity.”