d provisions, and hiding a portion of each under the
cellar floor, thanked God that they were not the garrison, and that
times were changed since the Thirty Years' War. These things done and
the siege formed, they folded their hands and let themselves slide into
the current of an idle life, flecked from time to time with bubbles of
excitement. When the Austrian guns rumbled without, and the smoke eddied
slowly over the walls, they stood in the streets, their hands in their
muffs, and gossiped not unpleasantly; when the cannon were silent they
smoked their long pipes on the ramparts, and measured the advance of the
trenches, and listened while the oldest inhabitant prosed of the sack by
Spinola in '24 and the winter siege of '41.

Whether the good townsfolk were as brave in private--when at home with
their wives, for instance--may be doubted; but this for certain, the
Burgomaster's trouble lay all with the women. Whether they had less
faith in the great Louis, Fourteenth of the name, King of France--who,
indeed, seemed in these days less superior to a world in arms than in
the dawn of his glory--or they found the oldest inhabitant's tales too
precisely to the point, they had a way of growing restive once a week,
besieged the good Burgomaster's house, and demanded--with a thousand
shrill and voluble tongues--immediate surrender on terms. Between
whiles, being busy with scrubbing and baking, and washing their
children, they were quiet enough. But as surely as Sunday came round,
and with it a clean house and leisure to chat with the neighbours, the
Burgomaster's hour came too, and with it the mob of women shaking
crooked fingers at him, and bursting his ears with their shrill abuse.
He was a bold man, but he began to dream at night of De Witt and his
fate--of which he knew, with many gruesome particulars; and, from a
stout and pompous burgher, he dwindled in six weeks to a lean and morose
old tyrant. Withal he had no choice, for at his shoulder lurked the
French Commandant, a resolute man with a wit of his own and a pet
curtain--between the Stadthaus bastion and the bastion of the Bronze
Horse, and very handy to the former--whereat he shot deserters and the
like on the smallest pretext.

Still, the Burgomaster, as he wiped his sallow face, and watched the
last of the women withdraw on the seventh Sunday of the Siege, began to
think that, rather than pass through this again, he would face even the
curtain and a volley; if h