to afford a refuge for non-combatants, and in fact, the officers were soon engaged in entertaining a frightened crowd of ladies and children.  The Intrepid in particular, was so near the Marina that a fair swimmer could have reached it in a few minutes; nobody guessed, least of all Garibaldi, that her mission in the mind of the British admiral was to save the chiefs own life in what seemed the likely case of its being placed in peril.

Admiral Mundy begged the authorities to stop the bombardment before the city was destroyed, but Lanza appeared to have no intention of yielding to his counsels, and it is still uncertain what at last induced him on the 30th of May to sue the Filibuster, hastily transformed into his Excellency, for an armistice of twenty-four hours.  ‘God knows,’ writes Garibaldi, ‘if we had want of it!’ The royalists had lost nearly the whole city except the palace and its surroundings, and, cut off from the sea, they began to feel a scarcity of food, but not to a severe extent.  It seems most probable that with his men panic-stricken and constantly driven back in spite of the bombardment, Lanza looked upon the game as lost, when had he known the straits to which the Garibaldians were reduced for ammunition, he might have considered it as won.

An unforeseen incident now occurred; the royalist column, recalled from Corleone, which was largely composed of Bavarians, reached Porta Termini and opened a furious fire on the weak Garibaldian detachment stationed there.  Was it ignorance or bad faith?  Lieutenant Wilmot, who happened to be passing by, energetically waved his handkerchief and shouted that a truce was concluded; the assailants continued the attack till an officer of the Neapolitan staff who was in conference with Garibaldi at the time hurried to the spot, at his indignant request, and ordered them to desist.  A few minutes later, Garibaldi himself rode up in a wrathful mood, and while he was renewing his protests, a shell fell close by him, thrown from a ship which re-opened the bombardment on its own account.  Lieutenant Wilmot, who witnessed the whole affair, was convinced that there was a deliberate plan to surprise and capture the Italian chief after he had granted the armistice.

At a quarter past two on this eventful day, the 30th of May 1860, Garibaldi and the Neapolitan generals, Letizia and Chretien, stepped on board the flag-ship Hannibal which Admiral Mundy offered as neutral ground for their meeting.  Curiously enough, both parties, reaching the mole simultaneously, were rowed out in the same ship’s boat, which was waiting in readiness.  The Neapolitans insisted that Garibaldi should go on board first, either from courtesy or, as the admiral suspected, out of desire to find out whether he would be received with military honours.  With instinctive tact he had donned his old and rather shabby uniform of a major-general in the Sardinian army; the admiral’s course was, therefore, marked