to tell the tale of their disaster.  At least four thousand were killed, including those who were slain on the field, those who were suffocated in the marshes or the river, and those who were burned in the farm-houses where they had taken refuge.  It was uncertain which of those various modes of death had been the lot of Count Louis, his brother, and his friend.  The mystery was never solved.  They had, probably, all died on the field; but, stripped of their clothing, with their, faces trampled upon by the hoofs of horses, it was not possible to distinguish them from the less illustrious dead.  It was the opinion of, many that they had been drowned in the river; of others, that they had been burned.

[Meteren, v. 91.  Bor, vii. 491, 492.  Hoofd, Bentivoglio, ubi sup.  The Walloon historian, occasionally cited in these pages, has a more summary manner of accounting for the fate of these distinguished personages.  According to his statement, the leaders of the Protestant forces dined and made merry at a convent in the neighbourhood upon Good Friday, five days before the battle, using the sacramental chalices at the banquet, and mixing consecrated wafers with their wine.  As a punishment for this sacrilege, the army was utterly overthrown, and the Devil himself flew away with the chieftains, body and soul.]

There was a vague tale that Louis, bleeding but not killed, had struggled forth from the heap of corpses where he had been thrown, had crept to the, river-side, and, while washing his wounds, had been surprised and butchered by a party of rustics.  The story was not generally credited, but no man knew, or was destined to learn, the truth.

A dark and fatal termination to this last enterprise of Count Louis had been anticipated by many.  In that superstitious age, when emperors and princes daily investigated the future, by alchemy, by astrology, and by books of fate, filled with formula; as gravely and precisely set forth as algebraical equations; when men of every class, from monarch to peasant, implicitly believed in supernatural portents and prophecies, it was not singular that a somewhat striking appearance, observed in the sky some weeks previously to the battle of Mookerheyde, should have inspired many persons with a shuddering sense of impending evil.

Early in February five soldiers of the burgher guard at Utrecht, being on their midnight watch, beheld in the sky above them the representation of a furious battle.  The sky was extremely dark, except directly over:  their heads; where, for a space equal in extent to the length of the city, and in breadth to that of an ordinary chamber, two armies, in battle array, were seen advancing upon each other.  The one moved rapidly up from the north-west, with banners waving; spears flashing, trumpets sounding; accompanied by heavy artillery and by squadrons of cavalry.  The other came slowly forward from the southeast; as if from an entrenched camp, to encounter their assailants.