For the next day or two, however, our guns continued their fire.  But the French had been so completely overpowered by the heavy Russian metal that they were unable to assist us.  The sailors had had their full share of work during the bombardment.  Captain Peel, who commanded the party, was just the man to get the greatest possible amount of work from them.  Always in high spirits, taking his full share in all the work, and exposing himself recklessly in the heaviest fire, he was almost idolized by his men.

Jack Archer lived in a tent with five other midshipmen, and was attended upon by one of the fore-top men, who, not having been told off for the party, had begged permission to go in that capacity.

Tom Hammond was the most willing of servants, but his abilities were by no means equal to his good-will.  His ideas of cooking were of the vaguest kind.  The salt junk was either scarcely warm through, or was boiled into a soup.  The preserved potatoes were sometimes burned from his neglect of putting sufficient water, or he had forgotten to soak them beforehand, and they resembled bits of gravel rather than vegetables.  Sometimes the boys laughed, sometimes they stormed, and Tom was more than once obliged to beat a rapid retreat to escape a volley of boots and other missiles.

At first the tent was pitched in the usual way on the ground; but one of the boys, in a ramble through the camp, had seen an officer’s tent prepared in a way which added greatly to its comfort, and this they at once adopted.  Tom Hammond was set to dig a hole of eighteen inches smaller diameter than the circle of the tent.  It was three feet in depth, with perpendicular sides.  At nine inches from the edge a trench a foot deep was dug.  In the centre was an old flour barrel filled with earth.  Upon this stood the tent-pole.  The tent was brought down so as to extend six inches into the ditch, the nine-inch rim of earth standing inside serving as a shelf on which to put odds and ends.  A wall of sods, two feet high, was erected round the outside of the little ditch.  Thus a comfortable habitation was formed.  The additional three feet of height added greatly to the size of the tent, as the occupants could now stand near the edges instead of in the centre only.  It was much warmer than before at night, and all draught was excluded by the tent overlapping the ditch, and by the wall outside.  A short ladder at the entrance enabled them to get in and out.

Tom Hammond had grumbled at first at the labor which this freak of his masters entailed.  But as the work went on and he saw how snug and comfortable was the result, he took a pride in it, and the time was not far off when its utility was to become manifest.  Indeed, later on in the winter the greater portion of the tents were got up in this manner.

The camp of the Light Division was not far from that of the sailors, and the two brothers were often together.  Fortunately both of them had so far escaped the illnesses which had already decimated the army.