by day, and hand to hand fights on the bodies of the slain, ever and anon a mine would explode, blowing the living and dead, friend and foe, together in the air. An awful silence would succeed for a moment, and then, over the groans of the dying, would ring again the rallying cry of the brave inhabitants. The streets ran torrents of blood, and the stench of putrefied bodies loaded the air. Thus, for three weeks, did the fight and butchery go on, within the city walls, till the soldiers grew dispirited and ready to give up the hope of spoils, if they could escape the ruin that encompassed them. Yet theirs was a comfortable lot to that of the besieged. Shut up in the cellars with the dead, pinched with famine, while the pestilence rioted without mercy and without resistance, they heard around them the incessant bursting of bombs, and thunder of artillery, and explosions of mines, and crash of falling houses, till the city shook, night and day, as within the grasp of an earthquake. Thousands fell daily, and the town was a mass of ruins. Yet, unconquered and apparently unconquerable, the inhabitants struggled on. Out of the dens they had made for themselves among the ruins, and from the cellars where there were more dead than living, men would crawl to fight, who looked more like spectres than warriors. Women would work the guns, and, musket in hand, advance fearlessly to the charge; and hundreds thus fell, fighting for their homes and their firesides. Amid this scene of devastation,--against this prolonged and almost hopeless struggle of weeks,--against the pestilence that had appeared in his own army, and was mowing down his own troops,--and, above all, against the increased murmurs and now open clamors of the soldiers, declaring that the siege must be abandoned till reinforcements could come up,--Lannes remained unshaken and untiring. The incessant roar and crash around him, the fetid air, the exhausting toil, the carnage and the pestilence, could not change his iron will. He had decreed that Saragossa--which had heretofore baffled every attempt to take it--should fall. At length, by a vigorous attempt, he took the convent of St. Laran, in the suburbs of the town, and planted his artillery there, which soon levelled the city around it with the ground. To finish this work of destruction by one grand blow, he caused six mines to be run under the main street of the city, each of which was charged with three thousand pounds of powder. But before the time appointed for their explosion arrived, the town capitulated. The historians of this siege describe the appearance of the city and its inhabitants, after the surrender, as inconceivably horrible. With only a single wall between them and the enemy’s trenches, they had endured a siege of nearly two months by forty thousand men, and continued to resist after famine and pestilence began to slay faster than the enemy. Thirty thousand cannon-balls and sixty thousand bombs