to face, and at push of pike, the patriots reeled backward down the bank, and took refuge in their boats.  Admiral Haultain slipped as he left the shore, missed a rope’s end which was thrown to him, fell into the water, and, borne down by the weight of his armour, was drowned.  The enemy, pursuing them, sprang to the waist in the ooze on the edge of the dyke, and continued the contest.  The boats opened a hot fire, and there was a severe skirmish for many minutes, with no certain result.  It was, however, beginning to go hard with the Zeelanders, when, just at the critical moment, a cheer from the other side of the dyke was heard, and the Antwerp fleet was seen coming swiftly to the rescue.  The Spaniards, taken between the two bands of assailants, were at a disadvantage, and it was impossible to prevent the landing of these fresh antagonists.  The Antwerpers sprang ashore.  Among the foremost was Sainte Aldegonde, poet, orator, hymn-book maker, burgomaster, lawyer, polemical divine—­now armed to the teeth and cheering on his men, in the very thickest of the fight.  The diversion was successful, and Sainte Aldegonde gallantly drove the Spaniards quite off the field.  The whole combined force from Antwerp and Zeeland now effected their landing.  Three thousand men occupied all the space between Fort George and the Palisade.

With Sainte Aldegonde came the unlucky Koppen Loppen, and all that could be spared of the English and Scotch troops in Antwerp, under Balfour and Morgan.  With Hohenlo and Justinus de Nassau came Reinier Kant, who had just succeeded Paul Buys as Advocate of Holland.  Besides these came two other men, side by side, perhaps in the same boat, of whom the world was like to hear much, from that time forward, and whose names are to be most solemnly linked together, so long as Netherland history shall endure; one, a fair-faced flaxen-haired boy of eighteen, the other a square-visaged, heavy-browed man of forty—­Prince Maurice and John of Olden-Barneveldt.  The statesman had been foremost to urge the claim of William the Silent’s son upon the stadholderate of Holland and Zeeland, and had been, as it were, the youth’s political guardian.  He had himself borne arms more than once before, having shouldered his matchlock under Batenburg, and marched on that officer’s spirited but disastrous expedition for the relief of Haarlem.  But this was the life of those Dutch rebels.  Quill-driving, law-expounding, speech-making, diplomatic missions, were intermingled with very practical business in besieged towns or open fields, with Italian musketeers and Spanish pikemen.  And here, too, young Maurice was taking his first solid lesson in the art of which he was one day to be so distinguished a professor.  It was a sharp beginning.  Upon this ribband of earth, scarce six paces in breadth, with miles of deep water on both sides—­a position recently fortified by the first general of the age, and held by the famous infantry of Spain and Italy—­there was likely to be no prentice-work.