There is so much simplicity and so little effort in what they do that you are persuaded that they could, if it were necessary, do a hundred times more, that they could do everything. You judge that the sentiment that impels them is not the one you have experienced, mean and vain, but another and more powerful one, which has made men of them, living tranquilly in the mud, working and watching among the bullets, with a hundred chances to one of being killed, contrary to the common lot of their kind. It is not for a cross, for rank; it is not that they are threatened into submitting to such terrible conditions of existence. There must be another, a higher motive power. This motive power is found in a sentiment which rarely shows itself, which is concealed with modesty, but which is deeply rooted in every Russian heart--patriotism. It is now only that the tales that circulated during the first period of the siege of Sebastopol, when there were neither fortifications, nor troops, nor material possibility of holding out there, and when, moreover, no one admitted the thought of surrender--it is now only that the anecdote of Korniloff, that hero worthy of antique Greece, who said to his troops, “Children, we will die, but we will not surrender Sebastopol,” and the reply of our brave soldiers, incapable of using set speeches, “We will die, hurrah!”--it is now only that these stories have ceased to be to you beautiful historical legends, since they have become truth, facts. You will easily picture to yourself, in the place of those you have just seen, the heroes of this period of trial, who never lost courage, and who joyfully prepared to die, not for the defence of the city, but for the defence of the country. Russia will long preserve the sublime traces of the epoch of Sebastopol, of which the Russian people were the heroes! Day closes; the sun, disappearing at the horizon, shines through the gray clouds which surround it, and lights up with purple rays the rippling sea with its green reflections, covered with ships and boats, the white houses of the city, and the population stirring there. On the boulevard a regimental band is playing an old waltz, which sounds far over the water, and to which the cannonade of the bastions forms a strange and striking accompaniment. _SEBASTOPOL IN MAY, 1855._ Six months had rolled by since the first bomb-shell thrown from the bastions of Sebastopol ploughed up the soil and cast it upon the enemy’s works. Since that time millions of bombs, bullets, and balls had never ceased flying from bastions to trenches, from trenches to bastions, and the angel of death had constantly hovered over them.