illuminated the gathering gloom of night; and the loud cries of the assailants, who had succeeded in kindling this fire by their missiles, proclaimed the fierceness of the attack.  Governor Dorp was himself in the fort, straining every nerve to extinguish the flames, and to hold this most important position.  He was successful.  After a brief but bloody encounter the Spaniards were repulsed with heavy loss.  All was quiet again, and the garrison in the Porcupine were congratulating themselves on their victory when suddenly the ubiquitous Philip Fleeting plunged, with a face of horror, into the governor’s quarters, informing him that the attack on the redoubt had been a feint, and that the Spaniards were at that very moment swarming all over the three external forts, called the South Square, the West Square, and the Polder.  These points, which have been already described, were most essential to the protection of the place, as without them the whole counterscarp was in danger.  It was to save those exposed but vital positions that Sir Francis Vere had resorted to the slippery device of the last Christmas Eve but one.

Dorp refused to believe the intelligence.  The squares were well guarded, the garrison ever alert.  Spaniards were not birds of prey to fly up those perpendicular heights, and for beings without wings the thing was impossible.  He followed Fleming through the darkness, and was soon convinced that the impossible was true.  The precious squares were in the hands of the enemy.  Nimble as monkeys, those yellow jerkined Italians, Walloons, and Spaniards—­stormhats on their heads and swords in their teeth—­had planted rope-ladders, swung themselves up the walls by hundreds upon hundreds, while the fight had been going on at the Porcupine, and were now rushing through the forts grinning defiance, yelling and chattering with fierce triumph, and beating down all opposition.  It was splendidly done.  The discomfited Dorp met small bodies of his men, panic-struck, reeling out from their stronghold, wounded, bleeding, shrieking for help and for orders.  It seemed as if the Spaniards had dropped from the clouds.  The Dutch commandant did his best to rally the fugitives, and to encourage those who had remained.  All night long the furious battle raged, every inch of ground being contested; for both Catholics and Hollanders knew full well that this triumph was worth more than all that had been gained for the archduke in eighteen months of siege.  Pike to pike, breast to breast, they fought through the dark April night; the last sobs of the hurricane dying unheard, the red lanterns flitting to and fro, the fireworks hissing in every direction of earth and air, the great wicker piles, heaped up with pitch and rosin, flaming over a scene more like a dance of goblins than a commonplace Christian massacre.  At least fifteen hundred were killed—­ besiegers and besieged—­during the storming of the forts and the determined but unsuccessful attempt of the Hollanders to retake them.  And when at last the day had dawned, and the Spaniards could see the full extent of their victory, they set themselves with—­unusual alacrity to killing such of the wounded and prisoners as were in their hands, while, at the same time, they turned the guns of their newly acquired works upon the main counterscarp of the town.