although the look-out men always maintained they were aiming at some other object.  One morning I was still in bed, when a stampede of many feet down the passage warned me our sentinels had had a warning.  Quickly opening my door, I could not help laughing at seeing the foremost man running down the corridor towards our rooms with the precious Maxim gun, enveloped in its coat of canvas, in his arms as if it were a baby.  “They’re on us this time,” he called out; then came a terrific explosion and a crash of some projectile against the outer walls and doors.  The shell had fallen about 40 feet short of the convent, on the edge of the deserted garden.  Many explanations were given to account for this shot, none of which seemed to me to be very lucid, and I secretly determined to clear out as soon as the doctor would permit.  The very next day we had the narrowest escape of our lives that it is possible to imagine.  There had been very little shelling, and I had taken my first outing in the shape of a rickshaw drive during the afternoon.  The sun was setting, and our little supper-table was already laid at the end of the corridor into which our rooms opened, close to the window beside which we used to sit.  Major Gould Adams had just dropped in, as he often did, to pay a little visit before going off to his night duties as Commandant of the Town Guard, and our repast was in consequence delayed—­a circumstance which certainly helped to save our lives.  We were chatting peacefully, when suddenly I recollect hearing the big gun’s well-known report, and was just going to remark, “How near that sounds!” when a terrifying din immediately above our heads stopped all power of conversation, or even of thought, and the next instant I was aware that masses of falling brick and masonry were pushing me out of my chair, and that heavy substances were falling on my head; then all was darkness and suffocating dust.  I remember distinctly putting my hands clasped above my head to shelter it, and then my feeling of relief when, in another instant or two, the bricks ceased to fall.  The intense stillness of my companions next dawned upon me, and a sickening dread supervened, that one of them must surely be killed.  Major Gould Adams was the first to call out that he was all right; the other had been so suffocated by gravel and brickdust that it was several moments before he could speak.  In a few minutes dusty forms and terrified faces appeared through the gloom, as dense as the thickest London yellow fog, expecting to find three mutilated corpses.  Imagine their amazement at seeing three human beings, in colour more like Red Indians than any other species, emerge from the ruins and try to shake themselves free from the all-pervading dust.  The great thing was to get out of the place, as another shell might follow, the enemy having seen, from the falling masonry, how efficacious the last had been.  So, feeling somewhat dazed, but really not alarmed, as the whole thing had been too quick