gue.

With an irrepressible cry of rage, Alexander dashed his field-glass
to the ground, and shouted, in a voice broken with passion--

"So! They have tricked us. Let the bombardment begin at once, and
bring that flag down with the first shots!"

But before the words were out of his mouth, the bombardment had
already commenced in a very different fashion to that in which he had
intended that it should begin. So intense had been the interest with
which all eyes had been turned on the Cross of St. Paul's that no one
had noticed twelve little points of shining light hanging high in air
over the batteries of the besiegers, six to the north and six to the
south.

But the moment that the Ensign of St. George floated from the summit
of St. Paul's a rapid series of explosions roared out like a
succession of thunder-claps along the lines of the batteries. The
hills of Surrey, and Kent, and Middlesex were suddenly transformed
into volcanoes spouting flame and thick black smoke, and flinging
clouds of dust and fragments of darker objects high into the air.

The order of the Tsar was obeyed in part only, for by the time that
the word to recommence the bombardment had been flashed round the
circuit of the entrenchments, more than half the batteries had been
put out of action. The twelve air-ships stationed at equal intervals
round the vast ellipse, and discharging their No. 3 shell from their
four guns ahead and astern, from an elevation of four thousand feet,
had simultaneously wrecked half the batteries of the besiegers before
their occupants had any clear idea of what was really happening.

Wherever one of those shells fell and exploded, earth and stone and
iron melted into dust under the terrific force of the exploding
gases, and the air-ships, moving with a velocity compared with which
the utmost speed of the aerostats was as a snail's pace, flitted
hither and thither wherever a battery got into action, and destroyed
it before the second round had been fired.

There were still twenty-five aerostats at the command of the Tsar
which had not been sent against the relieving forces, and as soon as
it was realised that the aerial bombardment of the batteries came
from the air-ships of the Terrorist fleet, they were sent into the
air to engage them at all hazards. They outnumbered them two to one,
but there was no comparison between the manoeuvring powers of the two
aerial squadrons.

As soon as the aerostats rose into the a