pickets, amid the dense fog of that fatal November morning, found themselves all but surrounded by this vast force, and fighting desperately! Knapsacks were generally thrown aside, and the muskets of the pickets were in some instances so wet by overnight exposure, that they failed to explode, so others taken from the dead and wounded were substituted for them. There was firing fast and furious on every hand; the musketry flashing like red streaks through the gray gloom, towards the head of the beautiful valley of Inkermann, even before our regiment was formed and moved forward to the support of the pickets, who were retreating towards a small two-gun battery which had been erected, but afterwards abandoned during the progress of the siege. The great Russian cannon now opened like thunder from those hills which had been reached unseen by us, and then began one of the closest, because confused, most ferocious, and bloody conflicts of modern times. The Russian has certainly that peculiar quality of race, "which is superior to the common fighting courage possessed indiscriminately by all classes--the passive concentrated firmness which can take every advantage so long as a chance is left, and die without a word at last, when hope gives place to the sullen resignation of despair." Descriptions of battles bear a strong family likeness, and the history of one can only be written, even by a participant, long after it is all over, and after notes are compared on all sides; so to the subaltern, or any one under the rank of a general, during its progress, it is all vile hurly-burly and confusion worse confounded; and never in the annals of war was this more the case than at Inkermann. Though hidden by mist at the time, the scene of this contest was both picturesque and beautiful. In the foreground, a romantic old bridge spanned the sluggish Tchernaya, which winds from the Baidar valley through the most luxurious verdure, and thence into the harbour of Sebastopol between precipitous white cliffs, which are literally honeycombed with chapels and cells: thus Inkermann is well named the "City of the Caverns." These are supposed to have been executed by Greek monks during the reigns of the emperors in the middle ages, and when the Arians were persecuted in the Chersonesus, many of them found shelter in these singular and all but inaccessible dwellings. Sarcophagi of stone, generally empty, are found in many of the cells, which are connected with each other by stairs cut in the living rock, and of these stairs and holes the skirmishers were not slow to avail themselves. Over all these caverns are the ivied ruins of an ancient fort but whether it was the Ctenos of Chersonesus Taurica, built by Diophantes to guard the Heruclean wall, or was the Theodori of the Greeks, mattered little to us then, as we moved to get under fire beneath its shadow; and now, as if to farther distract the attention of the Allies from the real point of assault--which at first