Officers, citizens and even privates implored Fernando to come down.  A shell exploded in the air, and a piece grazed his shoulder, yet he kept his place on the rampart.  Terrence Malone, who could see no reason for courting death, had sought shelter behind a gun carriage.  Fernando’s anxiety and mortification increased as he witnessed the repeated failures of his gunners to hull the Xenophon.  Amid smoke, dust and whizzing missiles, he kept his post.  The thunder of guns, the whizzing balls, and shrieking shells were unheard in his great anxiety to defeat the British.

Suddenly a hand clutched his arm, and a silvery voice, which he recognized in an instant, cried: 

“This is folly!  Come down—­come down from this certain death!”

“Morgianna, you here!” he cried.  “For Heaven’s sake, go to the bomb-proof shelter.  You must not expose yourself here.”

“I will not go a step until you come from the rampart.”  She clung to him, and appealed so earnestly, the tears of anxiety and fear starting from her eyes, while her white, pleading face was upturned to his, that he could not deny her.  All other appeals had been unheeded, but Morgianna’s he could not refuse.

A wild cheer went up from the Americans within the fort as Morgianna descended from the redoubt with the daring captain.  He hurried her away to the bomb-shelter, where her father lay raging and fuming, because his infirmity would not allow him to take part in the contest.  Fernando obtained a promise from Morgianna that she would not venture from the shelter, by promising in return to keep off the redoubt.

The British shells were telling on the American fort.  Though the walls were strong and resisted their balls, several men had fallen beneath their shells.  Two solid shot and one shell struck Captain Lane’s elegant mansion on the hill, fired from spite, as the house was far removed from the fort, and no one was near it.  A cannon-ball entered the great, broad bay window overlooking the sea, made a wreck of the furniture in the parlor, crashed through the wall, shivering a tall mirror and spreading havoc in the room beyond.

The siege continued all day long, and late in the afternoon, just one hour before sunset, the redcoats appeared on the wooded hill back of the town, and opened fire with two small pieces and muskets.  Fernando’s riflemen had been waiting for this, and, with wild yells, they leaped the redoubts, deployed along the stone fences and houses and picked off the redcoats so rapidly, that they fled pell mell to their own works, glad to escape the bullets of those unerring riflemen.

The cannonade kept up until long after midnight.  The sky was ablaze with circling shells, and the headlands reverberated with ten thousand echoes.

All the guns in the fort save the thirty-two were silent, for the smaller cannon at that range were useless.  The soldiers in the fort lay on their arms, and Fernando slept none.  With anxious face he went the rounds of the fort, occasionally watching through an embrasure the ship beyond and the circling shells.  During the night, three more of their number were killed and six wounded, while as yet they had done the enemy no hurt.