The position had one remarkable feature. The Residency resembled nothing so much as a low island, set in a sea of native houses. Lawrence, with wise prevision, had attempted to clear each front of the Residency, and from June 12 he had some 600 workmen employed on this task. Nawabs’ palaces and coolies’ huts alike were attacked with pickaxe and gunpowder; but the undertaking was stupendous, and practically only the upper storeys of these houses were destroyed, so that they could not sweep the British entrenchments with their fire. But the lower walls were left standing, and these afforded perfect cover to the Sepoys, and enabled them to carry on their mining operations undetected. Along the eastern face these houses were at distances from the British entrenchments ranging from twenty-five to fifty yards; on the southern face they came up to within thirteen yards of the Residency front, an interval, say, as wide as a city lane! So close were the two hostile lines for those eighty-eight desperate days, that the British could easily overhear the talk of the Sepoys; and when bullets ceased to fly across the narrow space between, expletives—couched in shrill Hindu or in rough Anglo-Saxon—naturally took their place! The strength of the mutineers was a varying and uncertain quantity. Sometimes it was wildly guessed to have risen to 100,000, at other times to have sunk to 30,000. Colonel Inglis, in his official report of the siege, after speaking of “the terrific and incessant fire day and night,” says “there could not have been less than 8000 men firing at one time into our position.” This describes the common experience of eighty-eight days. And yet this great host, with all their constant tempest of fire, their repeated assaults, their innumerable mines, never gained a single foot of that ground above which flew the flag of England! Sir Henry Lawrence’s keen and forecasting intellect made the triumphant defence of Lucknow possible, but in that defence he himself took the briefest share. The siege practically began on July 1. Lawrence had taken up his quarters in a room in the Residency, which gave him a complete view of the enemy, but was also peculiarly open to their fire. On that first day the Sepoys threw an 8-inch shell into the room where Lawrence was sitting, but he escaped without injury. He was entreated to change his quarters, but answered, with a laugh, he did not think the enemy had a gunner good enough to put a second shot through that same window! He was still pressed, however, to change, and at last he consented to do so “when he had arranged for moving his papers.”