tance, and was more full of bustle and business
than had ever been dreamed of in that quiet nook since the days of Robert
the Frisian, who had built the old church of Ostend, as one of the thirty
which he erected in honour of St. Peter, five hundred years before.

For the States did not neglect their favourite little city. Fleets of
transports arrived day after day, week after week, laden with every
necessary and even luxury for the use of the garrison. It was perhaps the
cheapest place in all the Netherlands, so great was the abundance.
Capons, bares, partridges, and butcher's meat were plentiful as
blackberries, and good French claret was but two stivers the quart.
Certainly the prospect was not promising of starving the town into a
surrender.

But besides all this digging and draining there was an almost daily
cannonade. Her Royal Highness the Infanta was perpetually in camp by the
side of her well-beloved Albert, making her appearance there in great
state, with eighteen coaches full of ladies of honour, and always
manifesting much impatience if she did not hear the guns.

She would frequently touch off a forty-pounder with her own serene
fingers in order to encourage the artillerymen, and great was the
enthusiasm which such condescension excited.

Assaults, sorties, repulses, ambuscades were also of daily occurrence,
and often with very sanguinary results; but it would be almost as idle
now to give the details of every encounter that occurred, as to describe
the besieging of a snow-fort by schoolboys.

It is impossible not to reflect that a couple of Parrots and a Monitor or
two would have terminated the siege in half an hour in favor of either
party, and levelled the town or the besiegers' works as if they had been
of pasteboard.

Bucquoy's dyke was within a thousand yards of the harbour's entrance, yet
the guns on his platform never sank a ship nor killed a man on board,
while the archduke's batteries were even nearer their mark. Yet it was
the most prodigious siege of modern days. Fifty great guns were in
position around the place, and their balls weighed from ten to forty
pounds apiece. It was generally agreed that no such artillery practice
had ever occurred before in the world.

For the first six months, and generally throughout the siege, there was
fired on an average a thousand of such shots a day. In the sieges of the
American civil war there were sometimes three thousand shots an hour, and
from gun