composure fail, and he wept those rare, reluctant tears which strong men know. He wished to partake of the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. The service was held in the open verandah, the sound of the chaplain’s voice being broken by the incessant crackle of hostile muskets and the crash of cannon-ball. Brave men knelt with unshamed tears by Lawrence’s bedside, and partook of the Sacrament with him. After it was over the dying man begged them to kiss him. The whole story, indeed, recalls that scene in the cockpit of the _Victory_, and the dying Nelson’s “Kiss me, Hardy!” “Bury me,” said Lawrence, “without any fuss, and in the same grave with any men of the garrison who may die at that time.” Then, records his biographer, “speaking rather to himself than to those about him,” he framed his own immortal epitaph, a sentence which deserves to be remembered as long as Nelson’s great signal itself, and which, indeed, has the same key-word: “Here lies Henry Lawrence, who tried to do his duty. May God have mercy on him.” It is not so well known that Lawrence wished a verse of Scripture should be added to his epitaph. To the chaplain, Harris, he said, “This text I should like, ‘To the Lord our God belong mercies and forgivenesses, though we have rebelled against Him.’” “It was,” he added, with a sudden touch of loving memory, “on my dear wife’s tomb.” He was buried at nightfall. The combat was raging fiercely along each front of the Residency’s defences, and not an officer could follow the general to his grave. Four men of the 32nd were detailed to carry his body to its last rough resting-place. Before they lifted the couch on which it lay, one soldier drew down the sheet, and stooping, kissed with rough and quivering lips the dead man’s forehead, and each man of the party followed his example. What better sign of soldierly honour could be imagined? Lawrence’s burial curiously recalls that of Sir John Moore at Corunna. He, too, was buried, according to somewhat inaccurate tradition, “darkly, at the dead of night,” and had for his requiem the thunder of the foeman’s guns. The story of the siege is, in the main, one of personal combats; of the duels of hostile sharpshooters; of desperate fighting underground in the mines; of sorties by the few against the many; of the assaults of thousands repulsed by scores. As a type of the long-enduring courage with which individual “posts” were held may be taken the single fact that Captain Anderson, whose residence formed what was called “Anderson’s post,” and who had a garrison of only twenty men, held his position for five months, though a battery of nine 9-pounder guns was playing upon it almost day and night!