n the batteries of the town.
Thus the disgusted French saw the very guns which were intended to
batter down the defences of Acre--and which were glorious with the
memories of a dozen victories in Italy--frowning at them, loaded with
English powder and shot, and manned by English sailors.

It is needless to say that a siege directed by Napoleon--the siege of
what he looked upon as a contemptible and almost defenceless town, the
single barrier betwixt his ambition and its goal--was urged with
amazing fire and vehemence. The wall was battered day and night, a
breach fifty feet wide made, and more than twelve assaults delivered,
with all the fire and daring of which French soldiers, gallantly led,
are capable. So sustained was the fighting, that on one occasion the
combat raged in the ditch and on the breach for _twenty-five_
successive hours. So close and fierce was it that one half-ruined
tower was held by _both_ besiegers and besieged for twelve hours in
succession, and neither would yield. At the breach, again, the two
lines of desperately fighting men on repeated occasions clashed
bayonets together, and wrestled and stabbed and died, till the
survivors were parted by the barrier of the dead which grew beneath
their feet.

Sidney Smith, however, fought like a sailor, and with all the cool
ingenuity and resourcefulness of a sailor. His ships, drawn up on two
faces of the town, smote the French stormers on either flank till they
learned to build up a dreadful screen, made up partly of stones plucked
from the breach, and partly of the dead bodies of their comrades.
Smith, too, perched guns in all sorts of unexpected positions--a
24-pounder in the lighthouse, under the command of an exultant middy;
two 68-pounders under the charge of "old Bray," the carpenter of the
_Tigre_, and, as Sidney Smith himself reports, "one of the bravest and
most intelligent men I ever served with"; and yet a third gun, a French
brass 18-pounder, in one of the ravelins, under a master's mate. Bray
dropped his shells with the nicest accuracy in the centre of the French
columns as they swept up the breach, and the middy perched aloft, and
the master's mate from the ravelin, smote them on either flank with
case-shot, while the _Theseus_ and the _Tigre_ added to the tumult the
thunder of their broadsides, and the captured French gunboats
contributed the yelp of their lighter pieces.

The great feature of the siege, however, was the fiercenes