“MY LORD,--I have perused the propositions sent out by your commissioners, which I find such as deserve no answer. I have offered your lordship and the rest conditions which you may yet have, if you accept in time. If there be any thing in them obscure, needing explanation, or wanting circumstantials, for the better performing of the things intended therein I shall be willing to appoint commissioners on my part to treat with yours to that purpose upon these propositions of mine; provided you send commissioners instructed with power to treat and conclude, and return your resolution herein by six of the clock in the evening.--Yours, &c., “THO. FAIRFAX. “August 14, 1646.” [Illustration] In the meantime the besiegers went on with their approaches toward the Castle--their main works being not above some sixty yards distant--and had planted four mortar pieces in one place, and two mortar pieces at another, each mortar piece carrying a grenade shell twelve inches diameter. Towards the end of the siege, whilst the cannon of Fairfax was playing upon the Castle from the neighbouring height, and when casualties within the walls were of hourly occurrence, an incident occurred, which shows that in these perilous times even ladies deemed it necessary to apologise for being afraid of leaden bullets. “One evening, during the hottest period of the cannonade,” says Dr. Bayly, “there came a musket bullet in at the window of the withdrawing room, where my lord used to entertain his friends with his pleasant discourses after dinners and suppers, which, glancing upon a little marble pillar of the window, and from thence hit the Marquess upon the side of his head, and fell down flattened upon the table, which breaking the pillar in pieces, it made such a noise in the room, that his daughter-in-law, the Countess of Glamorgan, who stood in the same window, ran away as if the house had been falling down upon her head, crying out--‘O Lord! O Lord!’ But at length finding herself more afraid than hurt, she returned back again, no less excusing her--as she was pleased to call it--rudeness to her father, than acknowledging her fears to all the company. To whom the Marquess said: ‘Daughter, you had reason to run away when your father was knocked on the head.’ Then pausing some little while, and turning the flattened bullet round with his finger, he further said: ‘Gentlemen, those who had a mind to flatter me, were wont to tell me that I had a _good head_ in my younger days; but if I don’t flatter myself, I think I have a good head-piece in my old age, or else it would not have been _musket proof_.’” Of the exemplary good order observed by the household, before the establishment of a garrison within the Castle, an eye-witness has transmitted the following testimony:--