constructed ramparts were not likely to justify the vaunts uttered when they were thrown up nor to hold out many minutes before the whole artillery of Spinola.  Plainly on this last morsel of the fatal sandbank the word surrender must be spoken, unless the advancing trumpets of Maurice should now be heard.  But there was no such welcome sound in the air.  The weather was so persistently rainy and stormy that the roads became impassable, and Maurice, although ready and intending to march towards Spinola to offer him battle, was unable for some days to move.  Meantime a council, summoned by Marquette, of all the officers, decided that Ostend must be abandoned now that Ostend had ceased to exist.

On the 20th September the Accord was signed with Spinola.  The garrison were to march out with their arms.  They were to carry off four cannon but no powder.  All clerical persons were to leave the place, with their goods and chattels.  All prisoners taken on both sides during the siege were to be released.  Burghers, sutlers, and others, to go whither they would, undisturbed.  And thus the archdukes, after three years and seventy-seven days of siege, obtained their prize.  Three thousand men, in good health, marched out of little Troy with the honours of war.  The officers were entertained by Spinola and his comrades at a magnificent banquet, in recognition of the unexampled heroism with which the town had been defended.  Subsequently the whole force marched to the headquarters of the States’ army in and about Sluys.  They were received by Prince Maurice, who stood bareheaded and surrounded by his most distinguished officers; to greet them and to shake them warmly by the hand.  Surely no defeated garrison ever deserved more respect from friend or foe.

The Archduke Albert and the Infants Isabella entered the place in triumph, if triumph it could be called.  It would be difficult to imagine a more desolate scene.  The artillery of the first years of the seventeenth century was not the terrible enginry of destruction that it has become in the last third of the nineteenth, but a cannonade, continued so steadily and so long, had done its work.  There were no churches, no houses, no redoubts, no bastions, no walls, nothing but a vague and confused mass of ruin.  Spinola conducted his imperial guests along the edge of extinct volcanoes, amid upturned cemeteries, through quagmires which once were moats, over huge mounds of sand, and vast shapeless masses of bricks and masonry, which had been forts.  He endeavoured to point out places where mines had been exploded, where ravelins had been stormed, where the assailants had been successful, and where they had been bloodily repulsed.  But it was all loathsome, hideous rubbish.  There were no human habitations, no hovels, no casemates.  The inhabitants had burrowed at last in the earth, like the dumb creatures of the swamps and forests.  In every direction the dykes had burst, and the sullen wash of the liberated waves, bearing hither and thither