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 THE APRIL BOMBARDMENT. 195 the boundary line. In the course of the friendly chap. conversation that followed, they exchanged warm ! acknowledgments of the prowess displayed by their f r „£ e ° f respective foes ; and it was then that a straddling memtsex- comparison which afterwards had vogue in Paris between is said to have first been made. In recognising R^ssiar/ 1 "' the splendid tenacity of the defence, a French ° officer compared the siege of Sebastopol to the siege of Troy. He did not say (as said Mene- • siege of laus according to one tradition) that the siege had been a wretched mistake* In the course of the four days that followed the contimw- cessation of the general bombardment, the Flag- the bom- staff Bastion with its neighbouring auxiliaries directed continued to suffer heavily under the fire of the Flagstaff . Bastion besiegers, and on the 2 Oth, the breach wrought in and its ° auxiliaries. the ' crenelled wall ' was increased to a breadth of 28 yards. On the 21st of April, the Flagstaff Bastion was Their peril reduced to complete silence ; and this, we shall of April, see, was the day when the French, after dark, proved able to top the craters opened up by their mining, to join them all three together, and to connect them with their system of trenches, thus establishing at last their 4th Parallel at a distance of but a hundred paces from the counterscarp of the opposite Work. Then indeed the concurring success of two separate and vast operations might well seem to threaten a crisis in the life of the Flagstaff Bastion. At the cost of exciting an ebullition of warlike
 * Lempriere, voce Helen.