One strange and grim incident happened during the bombardment, and, to the Turkish mind especially, seemed to illustrate the doctrine of fatalism with appalling vividness. In the height of the firing, when the shells from the heavy siege-guns at Kalafat were dropping incessantly within the fortress, one of them, as it exploded, tore a great hole in the ground large enough to contain a horse. A Turkish woman, who was cowering with three children under the shadow of the wall, determined to take refuge in the newly made hole, reckoning by the doctrine of chances that it was about the least likely spot to be again disturbed. Hardly had she crept in and drawn the three children after her than another shell, leaving the cannon's mouth at Kalafat nearly two miles away, dropped into the very same hole and blew the four hapless creatures who were hiding there to atoms. On another occasion I saw a shell strike the angle of a house, tear two walls down, and reduce one half of a room to ruins. In the other half of the room were a Turkish woman and two children, all of whom escaped unhurt. As soon as the war had fairly started and the troops had smelt blood, the Circassians began to display the wild courage and the love of pillage inbred in them in the mountain fastnesses, which they only left to become the troublesome members of the Turkish Empire that they generally turned out to be. Of their bravery and resourcefulness there could be no question; but their rapacity was inextinguishable, and no one who did not wear a uniform was safe from them. Soon after the commencement of the bombardment, a party of about fifty Circassians organized a private raid on their own account into Roumanian territory, and carried it out with extraordinary dash and brilliancy. One dark night, when the flash of the guns at Kalafat and the answering stream of fire from the Widdin batteries illuminated the blackness with fitful gleams of light, the Circassians crossed the Danube in boats, towing their horses behind them by ropes. They had made ingenious lifebelts for the horses out of the inflated pigskins which were used as wine casks in the country, and thus equipped each hardy little animal swam easily behind the boats and crossed the river without mishap. When the Circassians reached the opposite bank, they removed these novel lifebelts, mounted their horses, shot a couple of Roumanian sentries, and galloped off in the darkness with the instinctive knowledge of the whereabouts of plunder that is born in the blood of hereditary cattle-stealers. Before long they had rounded up a goodly mob of the small black cattle of Roumania, and had them headed for the Danube. The Circassian is an expert stockman, and for the party to bring four hundred cattle down to the river was an easy task while the Kalafat gunners, blissfully unconscious of the _coup_ that was being executed under their noses, kept pounding away at the Widdin fortifications. To