Evening came, and the richest, most flourishing commercial capital in the world was here a heap of ashes, there a ruin, everywhere a plundered treasury.

Once the occupants of the smith’s shop heard a band of murderers raging and shouting outside of the smithy; but they passed by, and all day long no others entered the quiet street, which was inhabited only by workers in metal.

Ruth and old Rahel had remained behind, under the protection of the brave foreman.  Adam had told them to fly to the cellar, if any uproar arose outside the door.  Ruth wore a dagger, determined in the worst extremity to turn it against her own breast.  What did she care for life, since Ulrich had perished!

Old Rahel, an aged dame of eighty, paced restlessly, with bowed figure, through the large room, saying compassionately, whenever her eyes met the girl’s:  “Ulrich, our Ulrich!” then, straightening herself and looking upward.  She no longer knew what had happened a few hours before, yet her memory faithfully retained the incidents that occurred many years previous.  The maidservant, a native of Antwerp, had rushed home to her parents when the tumult began.

As the day drew towards a close, the panes were less frequently shaken by the thunder of the artillery, the noise in the streets diminished, but the house became more and more filled with suffocating smoke.

Night came, the lamp was lighted, the women started at every new sound, but anxiety for Adam now overpowered every other feeling in Ruth’s mind.  Just then the door opened, and the smith’s deep voice called in the vestibule:  “It is I!  Don’t be frightened, it is I!”

He had gone out with five journeymen:  he returned with two.  The others lay slain in the streets, and with them Count Oberstein’s soldiers, the only ones who had stoutly resisted the Spanish mutineers and their allies to the last man.

Adam had swung his hammer on the Mere and by the Zucker Canal among the citizens, who fought desperately for the property and lives of their families;—­but all was vain.  Vargas’s troopers had stifled even the last breath of resistance.

The streets ran blood, corpses lay in heaps before the doors and on the pavement—­among them the bodies of the Margrave of Antwerp, Verreyck, Burgomaster van der Mere, and many senators and nobles.  Conflagration after conflagration crimsoned the heavens, the superb city-hall was blazing, and from a thousand windows echoed the screams of the assailed, plundered, bleeding citizens, women and children.

The smith hastily ate a few mouthfuls to restore his strength, then raised his head, saying:  “No one has touched our house.  The door and shutters of neighbor Ykens’ are shattered.”

“A miracle!” cried old Rahel, raising her staff.  “The generation of vipers scent richer booty than iron at the silversmith’s.”

Just at that moment the knocker sounded.  Adam started up, put on his coat of mail again, motioned to his journeymen and went to the door.