[Sidenote: A NOVEL AND ASTONISHING SIGHT.] The exact object of the armistice it would have been hard to say, for neither French nor Russians seemed to find any bodies unburied. Shortly before one o'clock, the Russians retired inside their earthwork. At one o'clock the white flags were all hauled down in an instant, and the last fluttering bit of white bunting had scarcely disappeared over the parapet, when the flash, and roar of a gun from Malakoff announced that the war had begun once more. The French almost simultaneously fired a gun from their batteries also; in a minute afterwards the popping of rifles commenced as usual on both sides. The Cossacks about Balaklava were particularly busy, and, having nothing better to do, I spent an hour watching them through my glass from the artillery camp at Kadikoi. They had a picket of ten horsemen at Kamara, from which the vedettes on the top of Canrobert's Hill were furnished, and they had a similar body of eight horsemen on the slope at the back of No. 2 Redoubt. There were a few regular Hussars in a handsome dark blue or green uniform, with white belts, on duty as sentries. The horses seemed to follow the Cossacks about like dogs. The men all wore long loose grey coats and round fur caps. They could not be very badly off for provisions, inasmuch as the fields behind them towards the slope of the hill to Mackenzie's farm were tolerably well filled with cattle. From the top of Canrobert's Hill their vedette could see everything that went on in the plains, from the entrance to Balaklava to the ridges on which the French right rested. Not a horse, cart, or man, could go in or out of the town which this sentinel could not see if he had good eyesight, for he was quite visible to any person who gazed on the top of Canrobert's Hill. The works of the railway must have caused this Cossack very serious discomposure. What on earth could he think of them? Gradually he saw villages of white huts rise up on the hill-sides and in the recesses of the valleys, and from the Cavalry Camp to the heights of Balaklava, he could behold line after line of snug angular wooden buildings, each with its chimney at work, and he could discern the tumult and bustle of Vanity Fair. This might have been all very puzzling, but it could have been nothing to the excitement of looking at a long line of black trucks rushing round and under the hill at Kadikoi, and running down the incline to the town at the rate of twenty miles an hour. A number of the Cossacks did gallop up to the top of the hill to look at a phenomenon of that kind, and they went capering about, and shaking their lances, in immense wonderment and excitation of spirits when it had disappeared.