Very shortly after this first discovery, my friend made another, which somewhat counterbalanced his relief in the first, which was that one of the points most distinctly to be avoided was the very place he wished to reach, the Pylons themselves. Round about their base a howitzer battery was methodically placing high-explosive shell, and amongst the upper works a field battery was making very accurate practice with those most undesirable "woolly bears." There was nothing for it, however, and the longer one stopped and looked at it the worse it seemed, so, with feelings utterly unlike those that are popularly supposed to steel the heart of the hero who boldly faces death for his country's sake, he made his way under cover of such houses as still remained, to the mine buildings at the foot of the great steel structure. Here was destruction such as he had never seen. The buildings, strongly as they had been built to withstand the weight of the machinery within them, were completely shattered, their contents strewing the floors like scrap iron in a merchant's yard. Great iron girders were cut as by a knife, the bridge leading from the Pylons to the loading stages on the end of the Crassier, a riveted steel structure, was broken in half, the ends torn and frayed as though made of paper. The towers themselves are so massive and their weight is so distributed among many uprights, that, although many of these latter were bent or broken, the edifice they supported still stood gaunt and menacing, dominating the country-side. But their foot was no place to sit in idle conjecture that morning, as a shell that nearly blocked up the entrance to the shelter into which he had made his way abruptly reminded him. Waiting until its last fragments had fallen--a process that takes a surprisingly long time--he made a bolt over the ruins, climbing and scrambling up a refuse-covered slope, until he reached the foot of the winding stairs that rose up the centre of one of the towers. Fortunately for him, this stairway was partly enclosed by sheets of boiler-plate, for the next shell burst uncomfortably close and the fragments hit the boiler-plate with a sound that left no doubt in his mind of what his fate would have been had this shield not been there. Up the spiral stairway then--was ever such an interminable flight? Surely, notwithstanding the friendly morning mist, the whole German army must see him as he climbed ever higher! Those friendly steel sheets had been hit direct more than once at various times, leaving several turns of the stairway open, plain to everybody's view. However, nothing alarming happened, and the goal was reached--not the top of the tower where the winding pulleys hung, but a gallery that had formed the upper limit of travel of the cage, where the trolleys were unloaded and pushed across the bridge to the loading sheds. This gallery or platform stood perhaps a hundred and fifty feet above the