years about it, and would military honour permit him to break his vow?  It was a piteous sight, even for the besieged, to see human life so profusely squandered.  It is a terrible reflection, too, that those Spaniards, Walloons, Italians, confronted death so eagerly, not from motives of honour, religion, discipline, not inspired by any kind of faith or fanaticism, but because the men who were employed in this horrible sausage-making and dyke-building were promised five stivers a day instead of two.

And there was always an ample supply of volunteers for the service so long as the five stivers were paid.

But despite all Bucquoy’s exertions the east harbour remained as free as ever.  The cool, wary Dutch skippers brought in their cargoes as regularly as if there had been no siege at all.  Ostend was rapidly acquiring greater commercial importance, and was more full of bustle and business than had ever been dreamed of in that quiet nook since the days of Robert the Frisian, who had built the old church of Ostend, as one of the thirty which he erected in honour of St. Peter, five hundred years before.

For the States did not neglect their favourite little city.  Fleets of transports arrived day after day, week after week, laden with every necessary and even luxury for the use of the garrison.  It was perhaps the cheapest place in all the Netherlands, so great was the abundance.  Capons, bares, partridges, and butcher’s meat were plentiful as blackberries, and good French claret was but two stivers the quart.  Certainly the prospect was not promising of starving the town into a surrender.

But besides all this digging and draining there was an almost daily cannonade.  Her Royal Highness the Infanta was perpetually in camp by the side of her well-beloved Albert, making her appearance there in great state, with eighteen coaches full of ladies of honour, and always manifesting much impatience if she did not hear the guns.

She would frequently touch off a forty-pounder with her own serene fingers in order to encourage the artillerymen, and great was the enthusiasm which such condescension excited.

Assaults, sorties, repulses, ambuscades were also of daily occurrence, and often with very sanguinary results; but it would be almost as idle now to give the details of every encounter that occurred, as to describe the besieging of a snow-fort by schoolboys.

It is impossible not to reflect that a couple of Parrots and a Monitor or two would have terminated the siege in half an hour in favor of either party, and levelled the town or the besiegers’ works as if they had been of pasteboard.

Bucquoy’s dyke was within a thousand yards of the harbour’s entrance, yet the guns on his platform never sank a ship nor killed a man on board, while the archduke’s batteries were even nearer their mark.  Yet it was the most prodigious siege of modern days.  Fifty great guns were in position around the place, and their balls weighed from ten to forty pounds apiece.  It was generally agreed that no such artillery practice had ever occurred before in the world.