their heads above-ground next day, cautiously emerging like rabbits from their burrows, but always went back at night. That evening when I was dozing off to sleep there was a terrific crash of artillery, the vibration of the firing breaking every window of the house; and as it was quickly replied to by the batteries of Kalafat, I jumped into my clothes, and rushed out to find the cause of this sudden eruption of hostilities. It was plain enough. A Roumanian vessel loaded with troops was running the gauntlet down the river in front of Widdin; and as she steamed past in the night on the far side of the long island opposite the town, the smoke of her funnel betrayed her, and the earth-shaking roar of the forty heavy siege-guns in the Widdin batteries told that the attempt was discovered. Only the vessel's smoke-stack could be seen over the island by the sparks flying upwards in the dark, and through this phantasmal target the big shells hissed and shrieked in vain, bursting in mid-air and burying the fragments in Roumanian soil across the river. The batteries at Kalafat took up the tale at once, and for a few hours we had a lively time of it. It was the adverse fortune of war for the Roumanian vessel; for after she had dodged the storm of shells from our siege-guns and got safely out of range, she was blown up by a Turkish monitor lower down the river, and every soul on board perished. On June 1 I was detailed for duty in the main hospital, which was just then receiving an unusual amount of attention from the Kalafat batteries. Unfortunately for the wounded, this hospital was situated a few hundred yards from one of our batteries; and while the Roumanians were finding the range for this battery, a good number of their shells, which had too much elevation, dropped on the hospital and on the surrounding houses. I was sitting in my room in the hospital one day when a shell burst with an awful crash in the middle of a ward full of sick and wounded men. It struck the lattice of a window, and at once exploded. When I rushed in, the ward was full of dust and smoke, out of which came terrible screams and cries. Four of the patients had been killed on the spot, and seven others had been wounded. One man, who was delirious from malarial fever, had his side ripped open from hip to shoulder by a fragment of the shell. He was still alive, but wildly delirious. Another had his arm fearfully mangled, and I took it off at the shoulder there and then. The only nurses that I had were the men supplied by the different regiments for hospital duty. One of them, a stalwart private from my old regiment the Kyrchehir, was among the four who were killed by the shell. A great outcry was made outside Turkey about the Roumanians violating the Convention of Geneva and the principles of humanity by firing on the hospital; but my own opinion is that they could not avoid hitting it in the position which it occupied, and that it should never have been placed there at all.