as a catapult--that
contemporaries have been most bountiful in their records for the benefit
of posterity, feeling sure of a gratitude which perhaps has not been
rendered to their shades.

Especially the indefatigable Philip Fleming-auditor and secretary of
Ostend before and during the siege, bravest, most conscientious, and most
ingenious of clerks--has chronicled faithfully in his diary almost every
cannon-shot that was fired, house that was set on fire, officer that was
killed, and has pourtrayed each new machine that was invented or imagined
by native or foreign genius. For the adepts or, pretenders who swarmed to
town or camp from every corner of the earth, bringing in their hands or
brains to be disposed of by either belligerents infallible recipes for
terminating the siege at a single blow, if only their theories could be
understood and their pockets be filled, were as prolific and as sanguine
as in every age. But it would be as wearisome, and in regard to the
history of human culture as superfluous, to dilate upon the technics of
Targone and Giustianini, and the other engineers, Italian and Flemish,
who amazed mankind at this period by their successes, still more by their
failures, or to describe every assault, sortie, and repulse, every
excavation, explosion, and cannonade, as to disinter the details of the
siege of Nineveh or of Troy. But there is one kind of enginry which never
loses its value or its interest, and which remains the same in every
age--the machinery by which stout hearts act directly upon willing
hands--and vast were the results now depending on its employment around
Ostend.

On the outside and at a distance the war was superintended of course by
the stadholder and commander-in-chief, while his cousin William Lewis,
certainly inferior to no living man in the science of war, and whose
studies in military literature, both ancient and modern, during the brief
intervals of his active campaigning, were probably more profound than
those of any contemporary, was always alert and anxious to assist with
his counsels or to mount and ride to the fray.

In the town Sir Francis Vere commanded. Few shapes are more familiar to
the student of those times than this veteran campaigner, the offshoot of
a time-honoured race. A man of handsome, weather-beaten, battle-bronzed
visage, with massive forehead, broad intelligent eyes, a high straight
nose, close-clipped hair, and a great brown beard like a spade; capti