alls scaled,
and three guns taken without the loss of a man.

The defenders hastened at once to meet this new danger. They opened a
heavy fire upon the British, and sallying out, endeavored to retake the
outer rampart with the bayonet. A desperate contest ensued; but though
many of the English officers and soldiers fell, they would not yield
a foot of the position they had captured. Colonel Southwell, a man of
great personal strength and daring, was in the struggle three times
surrounded by the enemy; but each time he cut his way out in safety.

The sally was at last repulsed, and the English intrenched their
position and turned their captured guns against the fort. While both the
assaulting columns were occupied in intrenching themselves there was a
lull in the battle. The besieged could not venture to advance against
either, as they would have been exposed to the fire of the other, and to
the risk of a flank attack.

Peterborough exerted himself to the utmost. He ordered up the thousand
men under General Stanhope and made prodigious exertions to get some
guns and mortars into position upon the newly won ramparts.

Great was the consternation and astonishment in Barcelona when a loud
roar of musketry broke out round the citadel, and Velasco, the governor,
was thunderstruck to find himself threatened in this vital point by an
enemy whose departure he had, the evening before, been celebrating. The
assembly was sounded, and the church bells pealed out the alarm.

The troops ran to their places of assembly, the fortifications round the
town were manned, and a body of four hundred mounted grenadiers under
the Marquis de Risbourg hurried off to the succor of Montjuich. The earl
had been sure that such a movement would be made. He could not spare men
from his own scanty force to guard the roads between the city and the
castle, but he had posted a number of the armed Spanish peasants who
were in the pay of the army in a narrow gorge, where, with hardly any
risk to themselves, they might easily have prevented the horsemen from
passing. The peasants, however, fired a hurried volley and then fled in
all directions.

Lord Peterborough learned a lesson here which he never forgot, namely,
that these Spanish irregulars, useful as they might be in harassing an
enemy or pursuing a beaten foe, were utterly untrustworthy in any plan
of combined action. The succor, therefore, reached Montjuich in safety;
two hundred of the men dismo