coat slung across his
arm, and once or twice hesitated on the verge of indignant speech; but
by-and-by seemed to recollect himself, halted, turned, and, parting
from Treacher without more words, marched off for his customary evening
walk around the fortifications.

Let us follow him.

The garrison occupied the heights of a peninsula connected with St.
Lide's by a low sandy isthmus, across which it looked towards the
"country side" of the island, though this country side was in fact
concealed by rising ground, for the most part uncultivated, where
sheets of mesembryanthemum draped the outcropping ledges of granite. At
the foot of the hill, around the pier and harbour to the north and
east, clustered St. Hugh's town, and climbed by one devious street to
the garrison gate. From where he stood the Commandant could almost look
down its chimneys. Along the isthmus straggled a few houses in double
line, known as New Town, and beyond, where the isthmus widened, lay the
Old Town around its Parish Church. These three together made Garland
Town, the capital of the Islands; and the population of St.
Lide's--town, garrison, and country side--numbered a little over
fourteen hundred. Garrison Hill, rising (as we have seen) with a pretty
steep acclivity, attains the height of a hundred and ten feet above sea
level. It measures about three-quarters of a mile in length and a
quarter of a mile in breadth, and the lines of fortification extended
around the whole hill (except upon the north-west side, which happened
to be the most important); a circuit of one mile and a quarter.

[Illustration]

You entered them beneath a massive but ruinous gateway, surmounted by a
bell, which Sergeant Treacher rang regularly at six, nine, and twelve
o'clock in the morning, and at three, six, and nine p.m., and struck to
announce the intervening hours: for the Islands had no public clock. To
the left of this gateway the Commandant always began his round,
starting from King George's Battery, to which in old days the Islanders
had looked for warning of the enemy's approach. Then it had mounted
seven long eighteen-pounders: now--The Commandant sighed and moved
on; past the Duke's Battery (four eighteen-pounders), the Vixen (one
eighteen and one nine-pounder), and along by a breastwork pierced with
embrasures to the important battery on Day Point, at the extreme
south-east. Here five thirty-two pounders--and, three hundred yards
away to the west, in the g