some of the citizens to whom
he had spoken while at work at the pumps, that orders had been issued
that all gratings and windows giving light to cellars, should be closed
by wet sacks being piled against them, and should then be covered
thickly with earth, as several women had been caught in the act of
pouring petroleum into the cellars and then dropping lighted matches
down upon it.

These wretches had been shot instantly, but the fresh fires continually
springing up showed that the work was still going on.

It was strangely silent in the streets. With the exception of the
sentries at every corner there were few persons indeed abroad. Many were
looking from the windows, but few, indeed, ventured out. They knew not
what orders had been given to the sentries and feared arrest were they
to stir beyond their doors. Moreover, the occasional crash of a shell
from the insurgent batteries, the whistling of bullets, and the frequent
discharge of musket shots still kept up by groups of desperate
Communists who had taken refuge in the houses, was sufficient alone to
deter them from making any attempt to learn what was going on. But in
the absence of footfalls in the street and of the sound of vehicles, the
distant noises were strangely audible. The rustle of the flames at the
Hotel de Ville and the great fires across the river, the crash of the
falling roofs and walls, the incessant rattle of distant musketry, and
the boom of cannon, formed a weird contrast to the silence that
prevailed in the quarter. Cuthbert felt that he breathed more freely
when he issued out again into the Champs Elysees.

The next day he did not go down. The advance continued, but progress was
slow. On the following morning Paris was horrified by the news published
in the papers at Versailles that statements of prisoners left no doubt
that the Archbishop of Paris and many other priests, in all a hundred
persons, had been massacred in cold blood, the methods of the first
revolution being closely followed, and the prisoners made to walk out
one by one from the gate of the prison, and being shot down as they
issued out. Another statement of a scarcely less appalling nature was
that the female fiends of the Commune not only continued their work of
destruction by fire, but were poisoning the troops. Several instances of
this occurred. In one case ten men were poisoned by one of these furies,
who came out as they passed, and expressing joy at the defeat of the