By the 11th May, the enemy had effected a lodgment in a corner of the Porcupine, and already from that point might threaten the new counterscarp before it should be completed.  At the same time he had gnawed through to the West Bulwark, and was busily mining under the Porcupine itself.  In this fort friend and foe now lay together, packed like herrings, and profited by their proximity to each other to vary the monotony of pike and anaphance with an occasional encounter of epistolary wit.

Thus Spanish letters, tied to sticks, and tossed over into the next entrenchment, were replied to by others, composed in four languages by the literary man of Ostend, Auditor Fleming, and shot into the enemy’s trenches on cross-bow bolts.

On the 29th May, a long prepared mine was sprung beneath the Porcupine.  It did its work effectively, and the 29 May assailants did theirs no less admirably, crowding into the breach with headlong ferocity, and after a long and sanguinary struggle with immense lose on both sides, carrying the precious and long-coveted work by storm.  Inch by inch the defenders were thus slowly forced back toward their new entrenchment.  On the same day, however, they inflicted a most bloody defeat upon the enemy in an attempt to carry the great Polder.  He withdrew, leaving heaps of slain, so that the account current for the day would have balanced itself, but that the Porcupine, having changed hands, now bristled most formidably against its ancient masters.  The daily ’slaughter had become sickening to behold.  There were three thousand effective men in the garrison.  More could have been sent in to supply the steady depletion in the ranks, but there was no room for more.  There was scarce space enough for the living to stand to their work, or for the dead to lie in their graves.  And this was an advantage which could not fail to tell.  Of necessity the besiegers would always very far outnumber the garrison, so that the final success of their repeated assaults became daily more and more possible.

Yet on the 2nd June the enemy met not only with another signal defeat, but also with a most bitter surprise.  On that day the mine which he had been so long and so laboriously constructing beneath the great Polder Bulwark was sprung with magnificent effect.  A breach, forty feet wide, was made in this last stronghold of the old defences, and the soldiers leaped into the crater almost before it had ceased to blaze, expecting by one decisive storm to make themselves masters at last of all the fortifications, and therefore of the town itself.  But as emerging from the mine, they sprang exulting upon the shattered bulwark, a transformation more like a sudden change in some holiday pantomime than a new fact in this three years’ most tragic siege presented itself to their astonished eyes.  They had carried the last defence of the old counterscarp, and behold—­a new one, which they had never dreamed of, bristling before their eyes, with a flanking battery turned directly upon them.  The musketeers and pikemen, protected by their new works, now thronged towards the assailants; giving them so hearty a welcome that they reeled back, discomfited, after a brief but severe struggle, from the spot of their anticipated triumph, leaving their dead and dying in the breach.