tal discomfiture of the assailants,
who withdrew, leaving the fosse choked up with the bodies of their
slaughtered comrades. Again and again the attack was renewed, by an
enemy whose numbers allowed the storming parties to relieve one another,
while the breaches made by an unintermitting cannonade gave incessant
occupation to the besieged in repairing them. Fortunately, the number of
the latter enabled them to perform this difficult service; and though
many were disabled, and there were few who were not wounded, they still
continued to stand to their posts, with the same spirit as on the first
day of the siege.

[Sidenote: DESPERATE DEFENCE OF GELVES.]

But the amount of the garrison, so serviceable in this point of view,
was fatal in another. The fortress had been provisioned with reference
to a much smaller force. The increased number of mouths was thus doing
the work of the enemy. Notwithstanding the strictest economy, there was
already a scarcity of provisions; and, at the end of six weeks, the
garrison was left entirely without food. The water too had failed. A
soldier had communicated to the Spanish commander an ingenious process
for distilling fresh water from salt.[1274] This afforded a most
important supply, though in a very limited quantity. But the wood which
furnished the fuel necessary for the process was at length exhausted,
and to hunger was added the intolerable misery of thirst.

Thus reduced to extremity, the brave Sande was not reduced to despair.
Calling his men together, he told them that liberty was of more value
than life. Anything was better than to surrender to such an enemy. And
he proposed to them to sally from the fortress that very night, and cut
their way, if possible, through the Turkish army, or fall in the
attempt. The Spaniards heartily responded to the call of their heroic
leader. They felt, like him, that the doom of slavery was more terrible
than death.

That night, or rather two hours before dawn on the twenty-ninth of June,
Don Alvaro sallied out of the fortress, at the head of all those who
were capable of bearing arms. But they amounted to scarcely more than a
thousand men, so greatly had the garrison been diminished by death, or
disabled by famine and disease. Under cover of the darkness, they
succeeded in passing through the triple row of intrenchments, without
alarming the slumbering enemy. At length, roused by the cries of their
sentinels, the Turks sprang to their arms,