ground, and had once been glazed, but long ago every pane of glass had been shattered and the steel floor was thickly carpeted with the fragments. Once in the gallery one was fairly safe, for the floor and roof were of steel and so was the circular wall up to the level of the glazing. Nothing but pieces of shell coming through the windows--and the place was full of fragments showing where this had happened--or a direct hit from a heavy shell could do much damage. But it was not the place for a rest-cure, the moral effect of "woolly bears" bursting amongst the girder-work close to one, although one knew that by the time one heard the report the danger was over, was most disturbing. Once, too, a fairly heavy shell hit the tower itself, causing it to rock like a sapling in a gale, as my friend expressed it afterwards. His first thought was of the delights of his situation had it carried away part of the staircase, when he would be faced by the prospect of staying where he was till dusk or of swarming down the steelwork in full view of the German trenches, but fortunately this contingency did not arise. But the view that he obtained amply compensated for everything. From the grim black mass of Fosse 8, past the tower of Cité St. Elie, the cupola of Douvrin, the trees, magnificent in their thick verdure, that clothe the banks of a little stream that flows past Hulluch, to the strange medley of chimneys and elevators that gives to the works of the Société Métallurgique de Pont-à-Vendin the appearance of a fore-and-aft rigged vessel under sail, the whole country lay spread as on a map. Further south still, Lens and its thickly-built suburbs could be seen, and towards the west, the well-known country that we held, the high land of the Vimy Ridge, with Souchez at its feet, the tall slag-heaps of Noeux-les-Mines and Auchel, the dark mass of the Bois des Dames, the square tower of Béthune. What an observation post! No wonder that the enemy, whose use of the place for that very purpose was apparent by the presence of German newspapers and a broken table with some scraps of paper upon it, were determined to make it untenable by constant shelling.