rowding down to swell the hostile ranks,
already sufficiently numerous to render Napoleon's destruction apparently
certain. Still unintimidated, Napoleon pressed on, with the utmost
celerity, into the midst of his foes. On the 3d of March, twenty-three
days after leaving Cairo, he arrived at Jaffa, the ancient Joppa. This
place, strongly garrisoned, was surrounded by a massive wall flanked by
towers. Napoleon had no heavy battering train, for such ponderous machines
could not be dragged across the desert. He had ordered some pieces to be
forwarded to him from Alexandria, by small vessels, which could coast near
the shore. But they had been intercepted and taken by the vigilance of the
English cruisers. Not an hour, however, was to be lost. From every point
in the circumference of the circle, of which his little band was the
centre, the foe was hurrying to meet him. The sea was whitened with their
fleets, and the tramp of their dense columns shook the land. His only hope
was, by rapidity of action, to defeat the separate divisions before all
should unite. With his light artillery he battered a breach in the walls,
and then, to save the effusion of blood, sent a summons to the commander
to surrender. The barbarian Turk, regardless of the rules of civilized
warfare, cut off the head of the unfortunate messenger, and raised the
ghastly, gory trophy, upon a pole, from one of the towers. This was his
bloody defiance and his threat. The enraged soldiers, with extraordinary
intrepidity, rushed in at the breach and took sanguinary vengeance. The
French suffered very severely, and the carnage, on both sides, was awful.
Nothing could restrain the fury of the assailants, enraged at the wanton
murder of their comrade. For many hours a scene of horror was exhibited in
the streets of Jaffa, which could hardly have been surpassed had the
conflict raged between fiends in the world of woe. Earth has never
presented a spectacle more horrible than that of a city taken by assault.
The vilest and the most abandoned of mankind invariably crowd into the
ranks of an army. Imagination shrinks appalled from the contemplation of
the rush of ten thousand demons, infuriated and inflamed, into the
dwellings of a crowded city.

Napoleon, shocked at the outrages which were perpetrated, sent two of his
aids to appease the fury of the soldiers, and to stop the massacre.
Proceeding upon this message of mercy, they advanced to a large building
where a porti