of shell it was from the sound of it, and go on talking—­if there wasn’t any danger from it.  If a shell was bursting close over us, we stopped talking and stood still;—­ uncomfortable, yes, but it wasn’t safe to move.  When it let go, we went on talking again, if nobody hurt—­maybe saying, ‘That was a ripper!’ or some such commonplace comment before we resumed; or, maybe, we would see a shell poising itself away high in the air overhead.  In that case, every fellow just whipped out a sudden, ‘See you again, gents!’ and shoved.  Often and often I saw gangs of ladies promenading the streets, looking as cheerful as you please, and keeping an eye canted up watching the shells; and I’ve seen them stop still when they were uncertain about what a shell was going to do, and wait and make certain; and after that they sa’ntered along again, or lit out for shelter, according to the verdict.  Streets in some towns have a litter of pieces of paper, and odds and ends of one sort or another lying around.  Ours hadn’t; they had iron litter.  Sometimes a man would gather up all the iron fragments and unbursted shells in his neighborhood, and pile them into a kind of monument in his front yard—­a ton of it, sometimes.  No glass left; glass couldn’t stand such a bombardment; it was all shivered out.  Windows of the houses vacant—­looked like eye-holes in a skull.  Whole panes were as scarce as news.

’We had church Sundays.  Not many there, along at first; but by-and-bye pretty good turnouts.  I’ve seen service stop a minute, and everybody sit quiet—­no voice heard, pretty funeral-like then—­and all the more so on account of the awful boom and crash going on outside and overhead; and pretty soon, when a body could be heard, service would go on again.  Organs and church-music mixed up with a bombardment is a powerful queer combination—­along at first.  Coming out of church, one morning, we had an accident—­the only one that happened around me on a Sunday.  I was just having a hearty handshake with a friend I hadn’t seen for a while, and saying, ’Drop into our cave to-night, after bombardment; we’ve got hold of a pint of prime wh—.’  Whiskey, I was going to say, you know, but a shell interrupted.  A chunk of it cut the man’s arm off, and left it dangling in my hand.  And do you know the thing that is going to stick the longest in my memory, and outlast everything else, little and big, I reckon, is the mean thought I had then?  It was ’the whiskey is saved.’  And yet, don’t you know, it was kind of excusable; because it was as scarce as diamonds, and we had only just that little; never had another taste during the siege.

’Sometimes the caves were desperately crowded, and always hot and close.  Sometimes a cave had twenty or twenty-five people packed into it; no turning-room for anybody; air so foul, sometimes, you couldn’t have made a candle burn in it.  A child was born in one of those caves one night, Think of that; why, it was like having it born in a trunk.