engaged, silenced and destroyed such of the batteries as they had not yet attacked; made their way up the reaches of the river, and anchored close to Canton. The city lay almost defenceless under their guns, when the Plenipotentiary agreed to a suspension of hostilities on condition that the port should be reopened to British trade. This arrangement suited the Chinese admirably: the civil population would be enriched by the money paid by the merchants for the tea crop, then ready for delivery; while the military Mandarins gained time to cast new ordnance, to rebuild their ruined forts, and to reinforce the garrison before again defying the “Barbarians.”[126] The troops were ordered back to the harbour of Hong Kong, where Major-General Sir Hugh Gough, who had recently arrived from Madras to take command of the land forces, reorganised his little army, and attempted, though with small success, to infuse his own spirit of determination into the weak-kneed Plenipotentiary, whom Gough in a private letter described as “whimsical as a shuttle-cock.” It was not long before the position of affairs at Canton once more became most serious. The gun factories had been working night and day; the forts had been repaired and re-armed; large numbers of soldiers had arrived; and in May the extermination was decreed of the European merchants, who on the faith of the truce had now returned to their counting-houses. This roused the Plenipotentiary into temporary activity; he arranged with Gough and the senior naval officer for a combined assault on Canton, and warned all Europeans to leave the place forthwith. By the evening of the 23rd of May the navy, after hard work in bombarding the river forts by day and warding off the approach of fire-rafts by night, had prepared the way for the execution of Sir Hugh Gough’s plan for the capture of Canton. This city of a million inhabitants was surrounded by walls of great thickness, and from twenty-five to twenty-eight feet in height; its ramparts, bristling with guns, were manned by forty-five thousand regular soldiers and an equal number of militia. To the west, south, and east of the town were large and prosperous suburbs, but on the north this expansion had been checked by a range of heights which, running parallel with the northern wall, completely dominated Canton and its defences. The Chinese had realised that if these heights passed into the hands of the British the town would become untenable: not only had they defended them with four strong forts, armed with forty-two heavy guns, but they had formed a large entrenched camp outside the north-eastern corner of the city, in order further to secure the safety of the heights which they rightly anticipated would be the point of our attack. Such was the position against which Gough, with less than 2800 soldiers, sailors, and marines, was about to try his strength. He divided his little force into two columns of very unequal size.[127] The right, or smaller detachment,