“Must I make a little speech to them?” thought Volodia, on his way, accompanied by the yunker, to join the twenty artillery-men who, swords by their sides, were waiting for him outside--“or must I simply say to them, ‘How do you do, children?’ or, indeed, say nothing at all? Why not say ‘How do you do, children?’ I think I ought to;” and with his full and sonorous voice he cried boldly, “How do you do, children?” The soldiers replied cheerfully to his salutation; his young and fresh voice sounded agreeably in their ears. He put himself at their head, and although his heart was beating as if he had just run several furlongs, his walk was light and his face was smiling. When they got near the Malakoff mamelon, he noticed, while climbing up it, that Vlang, who did not leave his heels, and who had seemed so courageous down below in their quarters, stooped and ducked his head as if the bullets and shells which were whistling without cessation were coming straight towards him. Several soldiers did the same, and the majority of the faces expressed, if not fear, at least disquiet. This circumstance reassured him and revived his courage. “Here I am, then, I also, on the Malakoff mamelon. I imagined it a thousand times more terrible, and I am walking, I am advancing, without saluting the bullets! I am less afraid than the others, and I am not a coward, then,” he said to himself joyfully, with the enthusiasm of satisfied self-love. This feeling was, however, shaken by the spectacle that presented itself to his eyes. When he reached in the twilight the Korniloff battery, four sailors, some holding by the legs, others by the arms, the bloody corpse of a man with bare feet and no coat, were in the act of throwing him over the parapet. (The second day of the bombardment they threw the dead into the ditch, because they had no time to carry them off.) Volodia, stupefied, saw the corpse strike the upper part of the rampart, and slide from there into the ditch. Fortunately for him, he met at this very moment the commander of the bastion, who gave him a guide to lead him to the battery and into the bomb-proof quarters of the men. We will not relate how often our hero was exposed to danger during that night. We will say nothing of how he was undeceived when he noticed that instead of finding them firing here according to the precise rules such as they practise at Petersburg on the plain of Volkovo, he saw himself in front of two broken mortars, one with its muzzle bruised by a shell, the other still upright on the pieces of a destroyed platform. We will not tell how it was impossible for him to get the soldiers in order to repair it before daylight, how he found no charge of the calibre indicated in the “Manual,” nor describe his feelings at seeing two of his soldiers fall, hit before his eyes, nor how he himself, even, escaped death twenty times by a hair’s-breadth. Happily for him, the captain of the mortar, who had been given him for an assistant, a tall