of the opposing forces.  The Marshal, he said, was clearly no street-fighter.  Estimating the army under his orders in Milan at from ten to eleven thousand men of all arms, it was impossible for him to guard the gates and then walls, and at the same time fight the city.  Nor could he provision his troops.  Yesterday the troops had made one:  charge and done mischief, but they had immediately retired.  “And if they take to cannonading us to-day, we shall know what that means,” Romara concluded.  Angelo wanted to join him.  “No, stay here,” said Romara.  “I think you are a man who won’t give ground.”  He had not seen either Rinaldo or Ammiani, but spoke of both as certain to be rescued.

Rain and cannon filled the weary space of that day.  Some of the barricades fronting the city gates had been battered down by nightfall; they were restored within an hour.  Their defenders entered the houses right and left during the cannonade, waiting to meet the charge; but the Austrians held off.  “They have no plan,” Romara said on his second visit of inspection; “they are waiting on Fortune, and starve meanwhile.  We can beat them at that business.”

Romara took Angelo and his Swiss away with him.  The interior of the city was abandoned by the Imperialists, who held two or three of the principal buildings and the square of the Duomo.  Clouds were driving thick across the cold-gleaming sky when the storm-bells burst out with the wild Jubilee-music of insurrection—­a carol, a jangle of all discord, savage as flame.  Every church of the city lent its iron tongue to the peal; and now they joined and now rolled apart, now joined again and clanged like souls shrieking across the black gulfs of an earthquake; they swam aloft with mournful delirium, tumbled together, were scattered in spray, dissolved, renewed, died, as a last worn wave casts itself on an unfooted shore, and rang again as through rent doorways, became a clamorous host, an iron body, a pressure as of a down-drawn firmament, and once more a hollow vast, as if the abysses of the Circles were sounded through and through.  To the Milanese it was an intoxication; it was the howling of madness to the Austrians—­a torment and a terror:  they could neither sing, nor laugh, nor talk under it.  Where they stood in the city, the troops could barely hear their officers’ call of command.  No sooner had the bells broken out than the length of every street and Corso flashed with the tri-coloured flag; musket-muzzles peeped from the windows; men with great squares of pavement lined the roofs.  Romara mounted a stiff barricade and beheld a scattered regiment running the gauntlet of storms of shot and missiles, in full retreat upon the citadel.  On they came, officers in front for the charge, as usual with the Austrians; fire on both flanks, a furious mob at their heels, and the barricade before them.  They rushed at Romara, and were hurled back, and stood in a riddled lump.  Suddenly Romara knocked up the rifles of the couching Swiss; he yelled to the houses to stop firing.  “Surrender your prisoners,—­you shall pass,” he called.  He had seen one dear head in the knot of the soldiery.  No answer was given.  Romara, with Angelo and his Swiss and the ranks of the barricade, poured over and pierced the streaming mass, steel for steel.