shelter, according to the verdict. Streets in some towns have a litter
of pieces of paper, and odds and ends of one sort or another lying
around. Ours hadn't; they had IRON litter. Sometimes a man would gather
up all the iron fragments and unbursted shells in his neighborhood,
and pile them into a kind of monument in his front yard--a ton of it,
sometimes. No glass left; glass couldn't stand such a bombardment;
it was all shivered out. Windows of the houses vacant--looked like
eye-holes in a skull. WHOLE panes were as scarce as news.

'We had church Sundays. Not many there, along at first; but by-and-bye
pretty good turnouts. I've seen service stop a minute, and everybody sit
quiet--no voice heard, pretty funeral-like then--and all the more so on
account of the awful boom and crash going on outside and overhead; and
pretty soon, when a body could be heard, service would go on again.
Organs and church-music mixed up with a bombardment is a powerful queer
combination--along at first. Coming out of church, one morning, we had
an accident--the only one that happened around me on a Sunday. I was
just having a hearty handshake with a friend I hadn't seen for a while,
and saying, 'Drop into our cave to-night, after bombardment; we've got
hold of a pint of prime wh--.' Whiskey, I was going to say, you know,
but a shell interrupted. A chunk of it cut the man's arm off, and left
it dangling in my hand. And do you know the thing that is going to stick
the longest in my memory, and outlast everything else, little and big,
I reckon, is the mean thought I had then? It was 'the whiskey IS SAVED.'
And yet, don't you know, it was kind of excusable; because it was as
scarce as diamonds, and we had only just that little; never had another
taste during the siege.

'Sometimes the caves were desperately crowded, and always hot and close.
Sometimes a cave had twenty or twenty-five people packed into it; no
turning-room for anybody; air so foul, sometimes, you couldn't have made
a candle burn in it. A child was born in one of those caves one night,
Think of that; why, it was like having it born in a trunk.

'Twice we had sixteen people in our cave; and a number of times we had a
dozen. Pretty suffocating in there. We always had eight; eight belonged
there. Hunger and misery and sickness and fright and sorrow, and I
don't know what all, got so loaded into them that none of them were ever
rightly their old selves after the siege. They all died