Dawn tinges the horizon above Mount SapounÉ; the shadows of the night have left the surface of the sea, which, now dark blue in color, only awaits the first ray of sunshine to sparkle merrily; a cold wind blows from the fog-enveloped bay; there is no snow on the ground, the earth is black, but frost stings the face and cracks underfoot. The quiet of the morning is disturbed only by the incessant murmuring of the waves, and is broken at long intervals by the dull roar of cannon. All is silent on the men-of-war; the hour-glass has just marked the eighth hour. Towards the north the activity of day replaces little by little the tranquillity of night. On this side a detachment of soldiers is going to relieve the guard, and the click of their guns can be heard; a surgeon hurries towards his hospital; a soldier crawls out of his hut, washes his sunburned face with icy water, turns towards the east, and repeats a prayer, making rapid signs of the cross. On that side an enormous, heavy cart with creaking wheels reaches the cemetery where they are going to bury the corpses heaped almost to the top of the vehicle. Approach the harbor and you are disagreeably surprised by a mixture of odors; you smell coal, manure, moisture, meat. There are thousands of different objects: wood, flour, gabions, beef, thrown in heaps here and there; soldiers of different regiments, some provided with guns and with bags, others with neither guns nor bags, crowd together; they smoke, they quarrel, and they bear loads upon the steamer stationed near the plank bridge and ready to sail. Small private boats, filled with all sorts of people—soldiers, sailors, merchants, and women—are constantly arriving and departing. “This way for Grafskaya!” and two or three retired sailors rise in their boats and offer you their services. You choose the nearest one, stride over the half-decomposed body of a black horse lying in the mud two steps from the boat, and seat yourself near the helm. You push off from the shore; all around you the sea sparkles in the morning sun; in front of you an old sailor in an overcoat of camel’s-hair cloth and a lad with blond hair are diligently rowing. You turn your eyes upon the gigantic ships with scratched hulls scattered over the harbor, upon the shallops,—black dots on the sparkling azure of the water—upon the pretty houses of the town, to whose light-colored tones the rising sun gives a rosy tinge, upon the hostile fleet standing like light-houses in the crystalline distance of the sea, and, at last, upon the foaming waves, where play the salt drops which the oars dash into the air. You hear at the same time the regular sound of voices which comes over the water, and the grand roar of the cannonade at Sebastopol, which seems to increase in strength as you listen.

At the thought that you, you also, are in Sebastopol, your whole soul is filled with a sentiment of pride and of valor, and your blood runs quicker in your veins.

“Straight towards the Constantine, your excellency,” says the old sailor, turning around to the direction you are giving to the helm.

“Look! she has still got all her cannons,” remarks the lad with the blond hair as the boat glides along the side of the ship.

“She is quite new, she ought to have them. Korniloff lives on board,” repeats the old man, examining in his turn the man-of-war.

“There! it has burst!” cries the lad, after a long silence, his eyes fixed upon a small white cloud of drifting smoke suddenly appearing in the sky above the south bay, and accompanied by the strident noise of a shell explosion.

“They are firing from the new battery to-day,” adds the sailor, calmly spitting in his hand. “Come along, Nichka; pull away. Let’s pass the shallop.”

And the small boat moves rapidly over the undulating surface of the bay, leaves the heavy shallop behind laden with bags and with soldiers, unskilful rowers who are pulling awkwardly, and at last lands in the middle of a great number of boats moored to the shore in the harbor of Grafskaya. A crowd of soldiers in gray overcoats, sailors in black jackets, and women in motley gowns comes and goes on the quay. Some peasants are selling bread; others, seated beside their samovars, offer to customers warm drink.

Here, on the upper steps of the landing, are strewn about, pell-mell, rusty shot, shell, canister, cast-iron cannon of different calibres; there, farther away, in a great open square, are lying enormous joists, gun-carriages, sleeping soldiers. On one side are wagons, horses, cannon, artillery caissons, stacks of muskets; farther on, soldiers, sailors, officers, women, and children are moving about; carts full of bread, bags, and barrels, a Cossack on horseback, a general in his droschky, are crossing the square. A barricade looms up in the street to the right, and in its embrasures are small cannon, beside which a sailor is sitting quietly smoking his pipe. On the left stands a pretty house, on the pediment of which are scrawled numerals, and above can be seen soldiers and blood-stained stretchers. The dismal traces of a camp in war-time meet the eye everywhere. Your first impression is, doubtless, a disagreeable one; the strange amalgamation of town life with camp life, of an elegant city and a dirty bivouac, strikes you like a hideous incongruity. It seems to you that all, overcome by terror, are acting vacuously; but if you examine the faces of those men who are moving about you, you will think differently. Look well at this soldier of the wagon-train who is leading his bay troitka horses to drink, humming through his teeth, and you shall find that he does not go astray in this confused crowd, which in fact does not exist for him, for he is full of his own business, and will do his duty, whatever it is—will lead his horses to the watering-place or drag a cannon with as much calm and assured indifference as if he were at Toula or at Saransk. You notice the same expression on the face of this officer, with his irreproachable white gloves, who is passing before you, of that sailor who sits on the barricade smoking, of the soldiers who wait with their stretchers at the door of what was lately the Assembly Hall, even upon the face of the young girl who crosses the street, leaping from stone to stone for fear of soiling her pink dress. Yes, a great deception awaits you on your arrival at Sebastopol. In vain you seek to discover upon any face traces of agitation, fright, indeed even enthusiasm, resignation to death, resolution; there is nothing of all that. You see the course of every-day life; see people occupied with their daily toils, so that, in fact, you blame yourself for your exaggerated exaltation, and doubt not only the truth of the opinion you have formed from hearsay about the heroism of the defenders of Sebastopol, but also doubt the accuracy of the description which has been given you on the north side and the sinister sounds which fill the air there. Before doubting, however, go up to a bastion, see the defenders of Sebastopol on the very place of the defence, or rather enter straight into this house at whose door stand the stretcher-bearers. You will see there the heroes of the army, you will see there horrible and heart-rending sights, both sublime and comic, but wonderful and of a soul-elevating nature. Enter this great hall, which before the war was the hall of the Assembly. Scarcely have you opened the door before the odor exhaled from forty or fifty amputations and severe wounds turns you sick. You must not yield to the feeling which keeps you on the threshold of the room, it is an unworthy feeling; go boldly in, and not blush at having come to look at these martyrs. You may approach and speak with them. The wretches like to see a pitying face, to relate their sufferings, and to hear words of charity and sympathy. Passing down the middle between the beds, you look for the face which is the least rigid, the least contracted by pain, and on finding it decide to go near and put a question.

“Where are you wounded?” you hesitatingly ask an old, emaciated soldier, seated on his bed, watching you with a kindly look, and apparently inviting you to approach. You have, I say, put this question hesitatingly, because the sight of the sufferer inspires not only a lively pity, but also a sort of dread of hurting his feelings, joined with a profound respect.

“On the foot,” replies the soldier; and nevertheless you notice by the folds of the blanket that his leg has been cut off above the knee.

“God be praised!” he adds, “I shall be discharged.”

“Were you wounded long since?”

“It is the sixth week, your excellency.”

“Where do you feel badly now?”

“Nowhere only in my calf when it is bad weather; nothing but that.”

“How did it happen?”

“On the fifth bastion, your excellency, in the first bombardment. I had just sighted the cannon, and was going quietly to the other embrasure, when suddenly something struck my foot. I thought I had fallen into a hole. I looked—my leg was gone!”

“You didn’t have any pain at first, then?”

“None at all, only just as if I had scalded my leg; that’s all.”

“And afterwards?”

“None afterwards, only when they stretched the skin; that was a little rough. First of all things, your excellency, we mustn’t think. When we don’t think we don’t feel. When a man thinks, it is the worse for him.”

Meanwhile, a woman dressed in gray, with a black kerchief tied around her head, approaches, joins in the conversation, and begins to give a detailed account of the sailor: how he has suffered, how his life was despaired of for four weeks, how, when wounded, he made them stop the stretcher on which he was being carried to the rear in order to watch the discharge of our battery, and how the grand-dukes had spoken with him, had given him twenty-five rubles, and how he had replied that, not being able to serve any more himself, he would like to come back to the bastion to train the conscripts. The good woman, her eyes sparkling with enthusiasm, relates this in one breath, looking at you and then at the sailor, who turns away and pretends not to hear, busy with picking lint from his pillow.

“It is my wife, your excellency,” says the sailor at last, with an intonation of voice which seems to say, “You must excuse her; all that is woman’s foolish prattle, you know.”

You then begin to understand what the defenders of Sebastopol are, and you are ashamed of yourself in the presence of this man. You would have liked to express all your admiration for him, all your sympathy, but the words will not come, or those which do come are worthless, and you can only bow in silence before this unconscious grandeur, before this firmness of soul and this exquisite shame of his own merit.

“Ah, well, may God speedily cure you!” you say, and you stop before another wounded man lying on the floor, who, suffering horrible pain, seems to be awaiting his death. He is blond, and his pale face is much swollen. Stretched on his back, his left hand thrown up, his position indicates acute suffering. His hissing breath escapes with difficulty from his dry, half-open mouth. The glassy blue pupils of his eyes are rolled up under the eyelids, and a mutilated arm, wrapped in bandages, sticks out from under the tumbled blanket. A nauseating, corpse-like odor rises to your nostrils, and the fever which burns the sufferer’s limbs seems to penetrate your own body.

“Is he unconscious?” you ask of the woman who kindly accompanies you, and to whom you are no longer a stranger.

“No; he can still hear, but he is very bad;” and she adds, under her breath, “I have just made him drink a little tea. He is nothing to me, only I have pity on him; indeed, he has only been able to swallow a few mouthfuls.”

“How do you feel?” you ask him.

At the sound of your voice the wounded man’s eyes turn towards you, but he neither sees nor understands.

“That burns my heart!” he murmurs.

A little farther on an old soldier is changing his clothes. His face and his body are both of the same brown color, and as thin as a skeleton. One of his arms has been amputated at the shoulder. He is seated on his bed, he is out of danger, but from his dull, lifeless look, from his frightful thinness, from his wrinkled face, you see that this creature has already passed the greater part of his existence in suffering.

On the opposite bed you see the pale, delicate, pain-shrivelled face of a woman whose cheeks are flushed with fever.

“It is a sailor’s wife. A shell hit her on the foot while she was carrying dinner to her husband in the bastion,” says the guide.

“Has it been amputated?”

“Above the knee.”

Now, if your nerves are strong, enter there at the left. It is the operating-room. There you see surgeons with pale and serious countenances, their arms blood-splashed to the elbows, beside the bed of a wounded man, who, stretched on his back with open eyes, is delirious under the influence of chloroform, and utters broken phrases, some unimportant, some touching. The surgeons are busy with their repulsive but beneficent task, amputation. You see the curved and keen blade penetrate the healthy white flesh. The wounded man suddenly comes to himself with heart-rending cries, with curses. The assistant surgeon throws the arm into a corner, while another wounded man on a stretcher who sees the operation turns and groans, more on account of the mental torture of expectation than from the physical pain he feels. You will witness these horrible, heart-rending scenes; you will see war without the brilliant and accurate alignment of troops, without music, without the drum-roll, without standards flying in the wind, without galloping generals—you will see it as it is, in blood, in suffering, and in death! Leaving this house of pain, you will experience a certain impression of well-being, you will take long breaths of fresh air, and will be glad to feel yourself in good health; but at the same time the contemplation of these misfortunes will have convinced you of your own insignificance, and you will go up into a bastion without hesitation. What are the sufferings and the death of an atom like me, you will ask yourself, in comparison with these innumerable sufferings and deaths? Besides, in a short time the sight of the pure sky, of the bright sun, of the pretty city, of the open church, of the soldiers coming and going in all directions, raises your spirits to their normal state. Habitual indifference, preoccupation with the present and with its petty interests, resume the ascendant. Perhaps you will meet on your way the funeral cortege of an officer—a red coffin followed by a band and by unfurled standards—and perhaps the roar of the cannonade on the bastion will strike your ear, but your thoughts of a few moments before will not come back again. The funeral will only be a pretty picture for you, the growl of the cannon a grand military accompaniment, and there will be nothing in common between this picture, these sounds, and the clear, personal impression of suffering and death called up by the sight of the operating-room.

Pass the church, the barricade, and you enter the most animated, the liveliest quarter of the city. On both sides of the street are shop signs, eating-house signs. Here are merchants, women with men’s hats or with handkerchiefs on their heads, officers in elegant uniforms. Everything testifies to the courage, the assurance, the safety of the inhabitants.

Enter this restaurant on the right. If you want to listen to the sailors’ and the officers’ talk, you will hear them relate the incidents of the night before, of the affair of the 24th; hear them grumble at the high price of the badly cooked cutlets, and mention the comrade recently killed.

“Devil take me! we are badly off where we are now,” says the bass voice of a pale, blond, beardless, newly appointed officer, his neck wrapped in a green knit scarf.

“Where is that?” some one asks.

“In the fourth bastion,” replies the young officer; and at this reply you attentively look at him, and feel a certain respect for him. His exaggerated carelessness, his violent gestures, his too loud laughter, which would shortly before have seemed to you impudent, become in your eyes the index of a certain kind of combative spirit common to all young people who are exposed to great danger, and you are sure he is going to explain that it is on account of the shells and the bullets that they are so badly off in the fourth bastion. Nothing of the kind! They are badly off there because the mud is deep.

“Impossible to get up to the battery,” he says, pointing to his boots, muddied even to the upper-leathers.

“My best gun captain was instantly killed to-day by a ball in his forehead,” rejoins a comrade.

“Who was it? Mituchine?”

“No, another man.—Look here! are you never going to bring me my chop, you villain?” says he, speaking to the waiter.—“It was Abrossinoff, as brave a man as lived. He took part in six sorties.”

At the other end of the table two infantry officers are eating veal cutlets with green pease washed down by sour Crimean wine, by courtesy called Bordeaux. One of them, a young man with red collar and two stars on his coat, is telling to his neighbor with a black collar and no stars the details of the fight on the Alma. The first is a little the worse for liquor. His frequently interrupted tale, his uncertain look, which reflects the lack of confidence which his story inspires in his auditor, the fine part he gives himself, the too high color of his picture, lead you to guess that he is wandering away from the absolute truth. But you haven’t anything to do with these tales, which you will hear for a long time yet in the farthest corners of Russia; you have one wish alone, that is, to go straight to the fourth bastion, which you have heard so many and so varied reports about. You will notice that whoever tells you he has been there says it with pride and satisfaction; that whoever is getting ready to go there either shows a little emotion or affects an exaggerated sangfroid. If one man is joking with another, he will invariably tell him, “Go to the fourth bastion!” If a wounded man on a stretcher is met, and he is asked where he comes from, he will answer, almost without fail, “From the fourth bastion!” Two completely different notions of this terrible earthwork have been circulated; the first by those who have never put their foot upon it, and for whom it is the inevitable tomb of its defenders, the second by those who, like the little blond officer, live there and simply speak of it, saying it is dry or muddy there, warm or cold.

During the half hour you have been in the restaurant the weather has changed and the fog which spread over the sea has risen. Thick, gray, moist clouds hide the sun. The sky is gloomy, and a fine rain mixed with snow is falling, wetting the roofs, the sidewalks, and the soldiers’ overcoats. After passing one more barricade you go along up the broad street. There are no more shop-signs; the houses are uninhabitable, the doors fastened up with boards, the windows broken. On this side the corner of a wall has been carried away, on that side the roof has been broken in. The buildings look like old veterans tried by grief and misery, and stare at you with pride, one might say with disdain even. On the way you stumble over cannon-balls and into holes, filled with water, which the shells have made in the rocky ground. You pass detachments of soldiers and officers. You occasionally meet a woman or a child, but here the woman does not wear a hat. As for the sailor’s wife, she wears an old fur cloak, and has soldiers’ boots on her feet. The street now leads down a gentle declivity, but there are no more houses around you, nothing but shapeless masses of stones, of boards, of beams, and of clay. Before you, on a steep hill, stretches a black space, all muddy, and cut up with ditches. What you are looking at is the fourth bastion.

Passers become rare, no more women are met. The soldiers walk with rapid step. A few drops of blood stain the path, and you see coming towards you four soldiers bearing a stretcher, and on the stretcher a face of a sallow paleness and a bloody coat. If you ask the bearers where he is wounded, they will reply, with an irritated tone, without looking at you, that he has been hit on the arm or on the leg. If his head has been carried away, if he is dead, they will keep a morose silence.

The near whiz of balls and shells gives you a disagreeable impression while you are climbing the hill, and suddenly you have an entirely different idea from the one you recently had of the meaning of the cannon-shots heard in the city. I do not know what placid and sweet souvenir will suddenly shine out in your memory. Your intimate ego will occupy you so actively that you will no longer think of noticing your surroundings. You will permit yourself to be overcome by a painful feeling of irresolution. However, the sight of a soldier who, with extended arms, is slipping down the hill in the liquid mud, and passes near you, running and laughing, silences your small inward voice, the cowardly counsellor which arises in you in the presence of danger. You straighten up in spite of yourself, you raise your head, and you, in your turn, scale the slippery slope of the clay hill. You have scarcely gone a step before musket-balls hum in your ears, and you ask yourself if it would not be preferable to go under cover of the trench thrown up parallel with the path. But the trench is full of a yellow, fetid, liquid mud, so that you are obliged to go on in the path; all the more since it is the way everybody goes. At the end of two hundred paces you come out on a place surrounded by gabions, embankments, shelters, platforms supporting enormous cast-iron cannon, and heaps of symmetrically piled cannon-balls. These heaps of things give you the impression of a strange and aimless disorder. Here on the battery assembles a group of sailors; there in the middle of the enclosure lies a dismounted cannon, half buried in the sticky mud, through which an infantryman, musket in hand, is going to the battery, pulling out with difficulty first one foot and then the other. Everywhere in this liquid mud you see broken glass, unexploded shells, cannon-balls—every trace of camp life. You seem to hear the noise of a cannon-ball falling only two yards away, and from all sides come the sound of balls, which sometimes hum like bees, sometimes groan and split the air, which vibrates like a violin-string, the whole dominated by the sinister rumbling of cannon, which shakes you from head to foot and fills you with terror.

This is, then, the fourth bastion, this really terrible place, you say to yourself, feeling a little pride and a great deal of repressed fear. Not at all! You are the sport of an illusion. This is not yet the fourth bastion; it is the Jason redoubt, a place which, comparatively, is neither dangerous nor frightful. In order to reach the fourth bastion you enter the narrow trench which the infantryman follows, stooping over. You will perhaps see more stretchers, sailors, soldiers with spades, wires leading to the mines, earth-shelters equally muddy, into which only two men can crawl, and where the battalions of the Black Sea Sharpshooters live, eat, smoke, and put their boots on and off, in the midst of the dÉbris of cast-iron of every form thrown here and there. You will perhaps find here four or five sailors playing cards in the shelter of the parapet, and a naval officer, who, seeing a new face come up, and a spectator at that, will be really pleased to initiate you into the details of the arrangements and give you an explanation of them. This officer, seated on a cannon, is rolling a cigarette with such coolness, passes so quietly from one embrasure to another, and talks with you with such natural calmness, that you recover your own sangfroid, in spite of the balls which are whistling here in greater numbers. You ask him questions, and even listen to his tales. The sailor will describe to you, if you will only ask him, the bombardment of the 5th, the state of his battery with a single serviceable cannon, his men reduced to eight, and, moreover, on the morning of the 6th, the battery fired with every gun. He will tell you also how, on the 5th, a shell penetrated a bomb-proof and struck down eleven sailors. He will show you, through the embrasure, the enemy’s trenches and batteries, which are only thirty or forty fathoms distant. I fear, however, that, leaning out of the embrasure in order to examine the enemy better, you will see nothing, or that, if you perceive something, you will be very much surprised to learn that this white and rocky rampart a few steps away, and from which are spouting little clouds of smoke, is really the enemy—“him,” as the soldiers and sailors say.

It is very possible that the officer, either through vanity or simply, without reflection, to amuse himself, will be willing to have them fire for you. At his order the captain of the gun and the men, fourteen sailors all told, gayly approach the cannon to load it, some chewing biscuit, others cramming their short pipes in their pockets, while their hobnailed shoes clatter on the platform. Notice the faces of these men, their bearing, their movements, and you will recognize in each of the wrinkles of their sunburned faces with high cheek-bones, in each muscle, in the breadth of the shoulders, in the thickness of the feet shod with colossal boots, in each calm and bold gesture, the principal elements that make up the strength of Russia—simplicity and obstinacy. You will also see that danger, misery, and suffering in the war will have imprinted on these faces the consciousness of their dignity, of high thoughts, of a sentiment.

Suddenly a deafening noise makes you quake from head to foot. You hear at the same instant the shot whistling away, while a thick powder-smoke envelops the platform and the black figures of sailors moving about. Listen to their conversation, notice their animation, and you will discover among them a feeling which you would not expect to meet—that of hatred of the enemy, of vengeance. “It fell straight into the embrasure; two killed. Look! they are carrying them away,” and they shout for joy. “But he is getting angry now, he is going to hit back,” says a voice, and in truth you see at the same instant a flash and spurting smoke, and the sentinel on the parapet calls, “Cannon!” A ball whizzes in your ears and buries itself in the ground, digging it up and casting around a shower of earth and stones. The commander of the battery gets angry, renews the order to load a second, a third gun. The enemy replies, and you experience interesting sensations. The sentinel again calls, “Cannon!” and the same sound, the same blow, and the same throwing up of earth are repeated. If, on the other hand, he cries, “Mortar!” you will be struck by a regular, not disagreeable hissing, which has no connection in your mind with anything terrible. It comes nearer and with greater rapidity. You see the black ball fall to the ground, and the bomb-shell burst with a metallic cracking. The pieces fly in air, whistling and screeching; stones hit each other, and mud splashes over you. You feel a strange mixture of pleasure and fright at these different sounds. At the instant the projectile reaches you, you invariably think it will kill you. But pride keeps you up, and no one notices the dagger that is digging into your heart. So when it has passed without grazing you, you live again; for an instant a feeling of indescribable sweetness possesses you to such a degree that you find a special charm in danger, in the game of life and death. You would like to have a ball or a shell fall nearer, very near you. But the sentinel announces with his strong, full voice, “Mortar!” The hissing, the blow, the explosion are repeated, but accompanied this time by a human groan. You go up to the wounded man at the same time with the stretcher-bearers. He has a strange look, lying in the mud mingled with his blood. Part of his chest has been carried away. In the first moment his mud-splashed face expresses only fright and the premature sensation of pain, a feeling familiar to man in this situation. But when they bring the stretcher to him, and he unassisted lies down on it on his uninjured side, an exalted expression, elevated but restrained thoughts, enliven his features. With brilliant eyes and shut teeth he raises his head with an effort, and at the moment the stretcher-bearers move he stops them, and addressing his comrades with trembling voice, says, “Good-by, brothers!” He would like to say something more, he seems to be trying to find something touching to say, but he limits himself to repeating, “Good-by, brothers!” A comrade approaches the wounded man, puts his cap on his head for him, and turns back to his cannon with a gesture of perfect indifference. At the sight of your terrified expression of face the officer, yawning, and rolling between his fingers a cigarette in yellow paper, says, “So it is every day, up to seven or eight men.”

You have just seen the defenders of Sebastopol on the very place of the defence, and, strange to say, you will retrace your steps without paying the least attention to the bullets and balls which continue to whistle the whole length of the road as far as the ruins of the theatre. You walk with calmness, your soul elevated and strengthened, for you bring away the consoling conviction that never, and in no place, can the strength of the Russian people be broken; and you have gained this conviction not from the solidity of the parapets, from the ingeniously combined intrenchments, from the number of mines, from the cannon heaped one on the other, and all of which you have not in the least understood, but from the eyes, the words, the bearing, from what may be called the spirit of the defenders of Sebastopol.

There is so much simplicity and so little effort in what they do that you are persuaded that they could, if it were necessary, do a hundred times more, that they could do everything. You judge that the sentiment that impels them is not the one you have experienced, mean and vain, but another and more powerful one, which has made men of them, living tranquilly in the mud, working and watching among the bullets, with a hundred chances to one of being killed, contrary to the common lot of their kind. It is not for a cross, for rank; it is not that they are threatened into submitting to such terrible conditions of existence. There must be another, a higher motive power. This motive power is found in a sentiment which rarely shows itself, which is concealed with modesty, but which is deeply rooted in every Russian heart—patriotism. It is now only that the tales that circulated during the first period of the siege of Sebastopol, when there were neither fortifications, nor troops, nor material possibility of holding out there, and when, moreover, no one admitted the thought of surrender—it is now only that the anecdote of Korniloff, that hero worthy of antique Greece, who said to his troops, “Children, we will die, but we will not surrender Sebastopol,” and the reply of our brave soldiers, incapable of using set speeches, “We will die, hurrah!”—it is now only that these stories have ceased to be to you beautiful historical legends, since they have become truth, facts. You will easily picture to yourself, in the place of those you have just seen, the heroes of this period of trial, who never lost courage, and who joyfully prepared to die, not for the defence of the city, but for the defence of the country. Russia will long preserve the sublime traces of the epoch of Sebastopol, of which the Russian people were the heroes!

Day closes; the sun, disappearing at the horizon, shines through the gray clouds which surround it, and lights up with purple rays the rippling sea with its green reflections, covered with ships and boats, the white houses of the city, and the population stirring there. On the boulevard a regimental band is playing an old waltz, which sounds far over the water, and to which the cannonade of the bastions forms a strange and striking accompaniment.