unate sloop, however, in moving out from the beleaguered city,
ran upon some shoals before getting out of the Gullet and thus fell a
prize to the besiegers. She was laden with nothing more precious than
twelve wounded soldiers on their way to the hospitals at Flushing. These
prisoners were immediately hanged, at the express command of the
archduke, because they had been taken on the sea where, according to his
highness, there were no laws of war.

The stadholder, against his will--for Maurice was never cruel--felt
himself obliged to teach the cardinal better jurisprudence and better
humanity for the future. In order to show him that there was but one
belligerent law on sea and on land, he ordered two hundred Spanish
prisoners within his lines to draw lots from an urn in which twelve of
the tickets were inscribed with the fatal word gibbet. Eleven of the
twelve thus marked by ill luck were at once executed. The twelfth, a
comely youth, was pardoned at the intercession of a young girl. It is not
stated whether or not she became his wife. It is also a fact worth
mentioning, as illustrating the recklessness engendered by a soldier's
life, that the man who drew the first blank sold it to one of his
comrades and plunged his hand again into the fatal urn. Whether he
succeeded in drawing the gibbet at his second trial has not been
recorded. When these executions had taken place in full view of the
enemy's camp, Maurice formally announced that for every prisoner
thenceforth put to death by the archduke two captives from his own army
should be hanged. These stern reprisals, as usual, put an end to the foul
system of martial murder.

Throughout the year the war continued to be exclusively the siege of
Ostend. Yet the fierce operations, recently recorded, having been
succeeded by a period of comparative languor, Governor Dorp at last
obtained permission to depart to repair his broken health. He was
succeeded in command of the forces within the town by Charles Van der
Noot, colonel of the Zeeland regiment which had suffered so much in the
first act of the battle of Nieuport. Previously to this exchange,
however, a day of solemn thanksgiving and prayer was set apart on the
anniversary of the beginning of the siege. Since the 5th of July, 1601,
two years had been spent by the whole power of the enemy in the attempt
to reduce this miserable village, and the whole result thus far had been
the capture of three little external forts. The