countryman--and their cruisers were occasionally fortunate enough to
capture and bring in one of the pirate ships. In such cases, short shrift
was granted, and the buccaneers were hanged without mercy, thirty-eight
having been executed in one morning at Rotterdam. The admiral with most
of his vessels escaped, however, to the coast of Spain, where his crews
during the autumn mainly contrived to desert, and where he himself died
in the winter, whether from malady, remorse, or disappointment at not
being rewarded by a high position in the Spanish navy.

The war was in its old age. The leaf of a new century had been turned,
and men in middle life had never known what the word Peace meant. Perhaps
they could hardly imagine such a condition. This is easily said, but it
is difficult really to picture to ourselves the moral constitution of a
race of mankind which had been born and had grown up, marrying and giving
in marriage, dying and burying their dead, and so passing on from the
cradle towards the grave, accepting the eternal clang of arms, and the
constant participation by themselves and those nearest to them in the
dangers, privations, and horrors of siege and battle-field as the
commonplaces of life. At least, those Netherlanders knew what fighting
for independence of a foreign tyrant meant. They must have hated Spain
very thoroughly, and believed in the right of man to worship God
according to the dictates of his conscience, and to govern himself upon
his own soil, however meagre, very earnestly, or they would hardly have
spent their blood and treasure, year after year; with such mercantile
regularity when it was always in their power to make peace by giving up
the object for which they had been fighting.

Yet the war, although in its old age, was not fallen into decrepitude.
The most considerable and most sanguinary pitched battle of what then
were modern times had just been fought, and the combatants were preparing
themselves for a fresh wrestle, as if the conflict had only begun. And
now--although the great leaguers of Harlem, Leyden, and Antwerp, as well
as the more recent masterpieces of Prince Maurice in Gelderland and
Friesland were still fresh in men's memory--there was to be a siege,
which for endurance, pertinacity, valour, and bloodshed on both sides,
had not yet been foreshadowed, far less equalled, upon the fatal
Netherland soil.

That place of fashionable resort, where the fine folk of Europe now
bathe