in my regulation spit, or perhaps in my own skill as a swordsman, I stuck my sword in the mud beside me, took a steady aim, and shot him.” As soon as the Royal Irish had cleared the long battery of the enemy they climbed Pagoda Hill, to find that its garrison had been driven away by the shot and shell of the men-of-war and the artillery. As the Colours of the XVIIIth were raised on the top of the hill, those of the 55th began to float over the walls of Tinghae, and the capital of Chusan once more passed into our hands at the cost of some thirty killed and wounded. In the XVIIIth the casualties were a sergeant and six rank and file wounded. The loss of Chusan greatly annoyed the Chinese, who complained that we had not fought them fairly. Instead of anchoring our ships right under the cannon of the long battery and making a frontal attack by sea and land, as they expected, we had meanly bombarded the extreme ends of their line of defence, landed where their guns could not play upon us, and taken the battery in flank. Had cricket been one of the national institutions of China, the beaten troops would doubtless have said that we had not played the game! Leaving an adequate garrison in Chusan General Gough next attacked Chinhai, a seaport at the mouth of the Ningpo river, twelve miles from the important city of Ningpo. Its fortifications, though strong, were easily turned on the 10th of October, when the place was taken with a total loss of four killed and sixteen wounded. One man in the Royal Irish was killed[135] and four wounded. The Chinese suffered very heavily, for here, as elsewhere in the campaign, their arms were as indifferent as their shooting, and after standing well for a time they broke before a charge, and were then mowed down in every direction. The slaughter of the fugitives was a hideous necessity: we were but a handful in an enormous country, and our enemies were so numerous that we should have been overwhelmed by numbers had we not inflicted severe punishment upon them in every engagement. To the bad marksmanship of the Chinese must be attributed the XVIIIth’s good luck on this occasion. As the Royal Irish approached the range of strongly held hills which they were to seize, they found themselves on the bank of an unfordable canal, well under the enemy’s fire. This canal was spanned by a bridge, narrow in itself, and made still narrower by an arch across it; the archway was blocked by a large stone, and even after this obstruction had been removed the passage was so small that the men had to take off their great-coats in order to squeeze through it one by one. “We had one or two very stout fellows,” wrote one of the officers present, “whom we had great difficulty in pushing through, but when we came to the big drum we _were_ in a fix. However, we got a little boat, and put McGiff, the big drummer, and his drum into it, with a pole to shove himself across. The Chinese thought the big drum was some new form of