been dug, and where it had been designed to breach and storm the
place. To this I was urged by two motives, partly from the desire
of obtaining the best view possible of the fort, and partly that
I might examine the ground upon which the desperate affair
of the 14th of April took place. The reader cannot have
forgotten, that some hours before daylight on the morning of
that day, a vigorous and well-arranged sortie was made by the
garrison, and that it was not without hard fighting and a severe
loss on both sides that the attack was finally repulsed.

Mounting the heights, I soon arrived at St. Etienne, a little
village nearly on a level with the citadel, and not more than a
quarter of a mile from its walls. From this point I could
satisfy my curiosity to the full, and as the account may not,
perhaps, be uninteresting, I shall describe, as well as I am
able, the scene which here met my eyes.

St. Etienne

The ridge of little hills upon which the fort and village are
built, though it rises by gentle gradation from the sea, towards
the spot where I now stood, is nevertheless intersected and
broken here and there by deep glens or ravines. Two of these
glens, one to the right, the other to the left, chance to occur
immediately under the ramparts of the fortress, supplying, in
some measure, the purposes of a ditch, and leaving a sort of
table or elevated neck of land between them, the extremity of
which is occupied by the village. On this neck of land the
besieged had constructed one of the redoubts to which I alluded
as having been lately thrown up; whilst on another table, at the