nfortunate inhabitants--men, women, and children--were of course
exposed to perpetual danger, and very many were killed. Their houses were
often burned to the ground, in which cases the English auxiliaries were
indefatigable, not in rendering assistance, but in taking possession of
such household goods as the flames had spared. Nor did they always wait
for such opportunities, but were apt, at the death of an eminent burgher,
to constitute themselves at once universal legatees. Thus, while honest
Bartholomew Tysen, a worthy citizen grocer, was standing one autumn
morning at his own door, a stray cannon-ball took off his head, and
scarcely had he been put in a coffin before his house was sacked from
garret to cellar and all the costly spices, drugs, and other valuable
merchandize of his warehouse--the chief magazine in the town--together
with all his household furniture, appropriated by those London warriors.
Bartholomew's friends and relatives appealed to Sir Francis Vere for
justice, but were calmly informed by that general that Ostend was like a
stranded ship, on its beam-ends on a beach, and that it was impossible not
to consider it at the mercy of the wreckers. So with this highly
figurative view of the situation from the lips of the governor of the
place and the commander-in-chief of the English as well as the Dutch
garrison, they were fain to go home and bury their dead, finding when
they returned that another cannonball had carried away poor Bartholomew's
coffin-lid. Thus was never non-combatant and grocer, alive or dead, more
out of suits with fortune than this citizen of Ostend; and such were the
laws of war, as understood by one of the most eminent of English
practitioners in the beginning of the seventeenth century. It is true,
however, that Vere subsequently hanged a soldier for stealing fifty
pounds of powder and another for uttering counterfeit money, but
robberies upon the citizens were unavenged.

Nor did the deaths by shot or sword-stroke make up the chief sum of
mortality. As usual the murrain-like pestilence which swept off its daily
victims both within an without the town, was more effective than any
direct agency of man. By the month of December the number of the garrison
had been reduced to less than three thousand, while it is probable that
the archduke had not eight thousand effective men left in his whole army.

It was a black and desolate scene. The wild waves of the German ocean,
lashed by the