required to bring the army up to its old level--the resumption of the stock, which by general consent had been discarded at the beginning of the war: but this relic of barbarism was not taken into use for many months, and then only on the ceremonial parades at the end of the war. In justice to the XVIIIth it should be said that throughout the siege all ranks managed to turn out respectably attired. The officers wore their red shell-jackets or blue frocks under the regimental great-coat; and they were also provided with a non-regulation garment, much like the “coat-warm-British” of the present day, made of serge, lined with rabbit-skin, and reaching almost to the knee. The great-coats of the men looked decent, and concealed the blankets below them, converted into loosely fitting under-coats by the simple expedient of cutting holes in them for the men’s arms to come through. All ranks had fur caps, the envy of the whole army. About this time the Minié rifles, with which the army were then supposed to be armed, were issued to the Royal Irish, who had been hurried off to the war equipped with Brown-Bess percussion muskets, the same weapons that they had used in Burma. Even in the worst part of the winter the Allies never wholly discontinued their siege operations, and as the weather became less severe their parallels were pushed forward steadily towards Sebastopol. The Russians on their side had not been idle: large reinforcements from the field army so abundantly made good the losses of the garrison that Todleben could command the services of 6000, and even on occasions of 10,000 men in carrying out his improvements of the defences. He seized and fortified fresh ground overlooking some of the works of the Allies, and devised a successful method of harassing the men on duty in the trenches. Under cover of darkness he dug numbers of shallow rifle-pits within musketry range of our lines, posting in each a marksman whose duty it was to shoot at every living target he could see. These pits were gradually connected by continuous trenches, and became a source of much annoyance to the Anglo-French troops, who found them difficult to deal with: to turn the sharpshooters out with the bayonet was costly, while to shell so small a mark as they presented was very difficult, and therefore little sandbag forts were run up at intervals on the parapets of the trenches, manned by soldiers detailed to keep down the skirmishers’ fire. In spite, however, of Todleben’s efforts the Allies succeeded in arming their batteries with an imposing number of heavy guns, and early in April finished their preparations for a vigorous bombardment, the prelude (as it was universally believed) to the storming of Sebastopol. The French could bring to bear 378 pieces of ordnance; the British had only 123 guns and mortars available, but as for the most part they were much more powerful than those of the French, the difference in weight of metal was not great. The