re seemed cause for
thanksgiving.

Philip Fleming, too, obtained a four weeks' holiday--the first in eleven
years--and went with his family outside the pestiferous and beleaguered
town. He was soon to return to his multifarious duties as auditor,
secretary, and chronicler of the city, and unattached aide-de-camp to the
commander-in-chief, whoever that might be; and to perform his duty with
the same patient courage and sagacity that had marked him from the
beginning. "An unlucky cannon-ball of the enemy," as he observes, did
some damage at this period to his diary, but it happened at a moment when
comparatively little was doing, so that the chasm was of less
consequence.

"And so I, Philip Fleming, auditor to the Council of War," he says with
homely pathos, "have been so continually employed as not to have obtained
leave in all these years to refresh, for a few days outside this town, my
troubled spirit after such perpetual work, intolerable cares, and
slavery, having had no other pleasure allotted me than with daily
sadness, weeping eyes, and heavy yearnings to tread the ramparts, and,
like a poor slave laden with fetters, to look at so many others sailing
out of the harbour in order to feast their souls in other provinces with
green fields and the goodly works of God. And thus it has been until it
has nearly gone out of my memory how the fruits of the earth, growing
trees, and dumb beasts appear to mortal eye."

He then, with whimsical indignation, alludes to a certain author who
pleaded in excuse for the shortcomings of the history of the siege the
damage done to his manuscripts by a cannon-ball. "Where the liar dreamt
of or invented his cannon-ball," he says, "I cannot tell, inasmuch as he
never saw the city of Ostend in his life; but the said cannon-ball, to my
great sorrow, did come one afternoon through my office, shot from the
enemy's great battery, which very much damaged not his memoirs but mine;
taking off the legs and arms at the same time of three poor invalid
soldiers seated in the sun before my door and killing them on the spot,
and just missing my wife, then great with child, who stood by me with
faithfulness through all the sufferings of the bloody siege and presented
me twice during its continuance, by the help of Almighty God, with young
Amazons or daughters of war."

And so honest Philip Fleming went out for a little time to look at the
green trees and the dumb creatures feeding in the Dutch pastu