Then there began a concert which came from just overhead--a concert
of jarring sounds and little whispers. The "shrieking shrapnel," of
which one reads in the description of every battle, did not seem so
much like a shriek as it did like the jarring sound of telegraph
wires when some one strikes the pole from which they hang, and when
they came very close the noise was like the rushing sound that rises
between two railroad trains when they pass each other in opposite
directions and at great speed. After a few hours we learned by
observation that when a shell sang overhead it had already struck
somewhere else, which was comforting, and which was explained, of
course, by the fact that the speed of the shell is so much greater
than the rate at which sound travels. The bullets were much more
disturbing; they seemed to be less open in their warfare, and to
steal up and sneak by, leaving no sign, and only to whisper as they
passed. They moved under a cloak of invisibility, and made one feel
as though he were the blind man in a game of blind-man's-buff, where
every one tapped him in passing, leaving him puzzled and ignorant as
to whither they had gone and from what point they would come next.
The bullets sounded like rustling silk, or like humming-birds on a
warm summer's day, or like the wind as it is imitated on the stage of
a theatre. Any one who has stood behind the scenes when a storm is
progressing on the stage, knows the little wheel wound with silk that
brushes against another piece of silk, and which produces the
whistling effect of the wind. At Velestinos, when the firing was
very heavy, it was exactly as though some one were turning one of
these silk wheels, and so rapidly as to make the whistling
continuous.

When this concert opened, the officers shouted out new orders, and