eloped by the enemy. Fortunately Prince Maurice had
foreseen the danger, and had ordered all the cavalry to the meadows so
soon as the charge was made. Captain Kloet, with a fresh company of
mounted carabineers, marked the little squad of States' cavalry careering
about in the midst of the Catholics, recognized their leader by the
orange-plumes on his calque, and dashed forward to the rescue. Lewis
again found himself at the head of his cavalry, but was obliged to wait a
long time for the return of the stragglers.

While this brilliant diversion had been enacting as it were on the fringe
of the battle, its real bustle and business had been going on in the
downs. Just as Lewis made his charge in the pastures, the infantry of the
archduke and the advance guard of the republicans met in deadly shock.
More than an hour long they contended with varying success. Musketeers,
pikemen, arquebusmen, swordmen, charged, sabred, or shot each other from
the various hollows or heights of vantage, plunging knee-deep in the
sand, torn and impeded by the prickly broom-plant which grew profusely
over the whole surface, and fighting breast to breast and hand to hand in
a vast series of individual encounters. Thrice were the Spaniards
repulsed in what for a moment seemed absolute rout, thrice they rallied
and drove their assailants at push of pike far beyond their original
position; and again the conquered republicans recovered their energy and
smote their adversaries as if the contest were just begun. The tide of
battle ebbed and flowed like the waves of the sea, but it would be mere
pedantry to affect any technical explanation of its various changes. It
was a hot struggle of twenty thousand men, pent up in a narrow space,
where the very nature of the ground had made artistic evolutions nearly
impracticable. The advance, the battalia, even the rearguard on both
sides were mixed together pell-mell, and the downs were soon covered at
every step with the dead and dying-Briton, Hollander, Spaniard, Italian,
Frisian, Frenchman, Walloon, fighting and falling together, and hotly
contesting every inch of those barren sands.

It seemed, said one who fought there, as if the last day of the world had
come.

Political and religious hatred, pride of race, remembrance of a
half-century of wrongs, hope, fury, and despair; these were the real
elements contending with each other that summer's day. It was a mere
trial of ferocity and endurance, not more s