The National Palace on the Plaza, had five shells burst within it ; one of which, killed a woman and two children lying asleep in the kitchen."
" I rode to the town," says another writer, " to see what efiect our shells had on it. I was prepared to see much destruction, but was perfectly amazed. The town is oh its south-westerly side almost destroyed. The citizens of Vera Cruz say, the bombs did the most injury. They would fall on the houses, their weight carrying them fi'om roof to cellar, and then burst, opening the houses from top to bottom, and kilhng all within."
Mr. Hine, thus describes his visit, the dSj of the sur- render. " Scarcely a house did I pass, that did not show some great rent made by the bursting of our bomb-shells.
During my peregrinations, I came to a lofty and noble mansion in which a terrible bomb had exploded, and laid the whole front of the house in ruins. While I was exam- ining the awful havoc created, a beautiful girl of some seventeen came to the door, and invited me into the house. She pointed to the furniture of the mansion torn into fragments, and the piles of rubbish lying around, and informed me, while her beautiful eyes filled with tears, that the bomb had destroyed her father, mother, brother, and two little sisters, and that she was now left in the world alone !
" During the afternoon, I visited the hdspital. Here lay upon truckle-beds, the mangled creatures who had been wounded during the bombardment. In one corner was a poor decrepid, bed-ridden woman, her head white with the sorrows of seventy years. One of her withered arms had been blown off by a fragment of a shell. In another place might be seen mangled creatures of both sexes, bruised and disfigured by the falling of the houses, and the bursting of shells. On the stone floor lay a little child in a complete state of nudity, with one of its poor legs cut off just above the knee ! Not even this abode of wretchedness had been