ravelin continued to be the scene of murderous assault and successful resistance, of which it would be tedious to narrate particulars. Both parties, meanwhile, began to feel sensibly the effects of the long endurance of the siege. In the Mahometan ranks, and especially among the Janissaries, a prejudice of the nature of a superstition assigned forty days as the limit to which an operation of this nature could be extended. They considered it, at least, as a prerogative of their body to mutiny against an extension of that period. In the city, on the other hand, the condition of affairs had assumed a gloomy complexion. The casualties of war and disease had materially thinned the ranks of the garrison, and the mine and the battery, especially the former, had made gaps of ruin in the defences which no exertion of the besieged could fully repair, and which it became daily more difficult to maintain against the rush of numbers. Many of their guns had been rendered unserviceable; but the want of skilled artillery officers and men, with whom the city from the first had been ill provided, was still more severely felt. The engineer, Rimpler, had fallen; the colonel Werner, who commanded the ordnance, and who had effected his entrance into the city on the 17th July, lay wounded and disabled; and before the close of the siege, but two regular artillery officers remained fit for service. The outworks from the Burg, almost to the Scottish gate, were nothing but a mass of rubbish. The Löbel bastion in particular, and the adjacent houses in the street of that name, had specially suffered; but still more so the dwelling which still bears the name of the Turks’ House. Scarcity also was making rapid strides; and if the casualties of war diminished the number of consumers, falling as they did principally on the fighting men they also made it impossible to repeat the sallies which in the early part of the siege had sometimes swept into the city the cattle of the Turkish commissariat. The Turks, while their large force enabled them to close hermetically every channel of supply to the city, guarded their own communications with the utmost vigilance. Forage for the live cattle and sheep still in the city had also failed, and the supplies of the public shambles at the Lichtensteg and the Rothenthurm, were as lean and dry as they were dear and scanty. The small store of dried provision which remained was reserved for the soldiery, and the citizens at large were exposed to severe privation. The streets leading to the shambles were crowded with females, who often had to return home with empty baskets. The price of a pound of beef had risen in the proportion of 1 to 9, and sometimes 12. Articles of daily subsistence to families of middle rank had now become the luxuries of the rich. An egg cost half a dollar, pork eight silver groschen the pound; veal and poultry no longer existed. Under these circumstances, cats no longer enjoyed the immunity due, in times