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. There 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 or