rison were marched off to Dublin.
Only eight of the conquerors had fallen. [88]

Ginkell passed some days in reconstructing the defences of Ballymore.
This work had scarcely been performed when he was joined by the Danish
auxiliaries under the command of the Duke of Wirtemberg. The whole army
then moved westward, and, on the nineteenth of June, appeared before the
walls of Athlone. [89]

Athlone was perhaps, in a military point of view, the most important
place in the island. Rosen, who understood war well, had always
maintained that it was there that the Irishry would, with most
advantage, make a stand against the Englishry. [90] The town, which was
surrounded by ramparts of earth, lay partly in Leinster and partly
in Connaught. The English quarter, which was in Leinster, had once
consisted of new and handsome houses, but had been burned by the Irish
some months before, and now lay in heaps of ruin. The Celtic quarter,
which was in Connaught, was old and meanly built. [91] The Shannon,
which is the boundary of the two provinces, rushed through Athlone in
a deep and rapid stream, and turned two large mills which rose on the
arches of a stone bridge. Above the bridge, on the Connaught side,
a castle, built, it was said, by King John, towered to the height of
seventy feet, and extended two hundred feet along the river. Fifty or
sixty yards below the bridge was a narrow ford. [92]

During the night of the nineteenth the English placed their cannon. On
the morning of the twentieth the firing began. At five in the afternoon
an assault was made. A brave French refugee with a grenade in his hand
was the first to climb the breach, and fell, cheering his countrymen to
the onset with his latest breath. Such were the gallant spirits which
the bigotry of Lewis had sent to recruit, in the time of his utmost
need, the armies of his deadliest enemies. The example was not lost. The
grenades fell thick. The assailants mounted by hundreds. The Irish gave
way and ran towards the bridge. There the press was so great that some
of the fugitives were crushed to death in the narrow passage, and others
were forced over the parapets into the waters which roared among the
mill wheels below. In a few hours Ginkell had made himself master of the
English quarter of Athlone; and this success had cost him only twenty
men killed and forty wounded. [93]

But his work was only begun. Between him and the Irish town the Shannon
ran fiercely. The bridge