s army; the city went wild with joy.

For a few days the French made a show of carrying on the siege. They
were still enormously superior in force; but the energy and skill of
Peterborough counterbalanced the inequality. He worked day and night
in superintending the works of defense, and in placing the troops in
readiness for the expected assault. Philip and many of his officers
were still in favor of an attack upon the city; but Tesse as usual was
opposed to anything like vigorous measures, and his views were adopted
by a council of war.

At one o'clock on the morning of the 11th of May the besiegers broke
up their camp, and in great confusion made their way toward the French
frontier, for Tesse preferred even the ignominy of falling back into
France with his unsuccessful and dispirited army to retracing his steps
toward Saragossa, where his devastations and cruelty had caused the
whole population to rise in insurrection as soon as his army had passed
into Catalonia. Besides which, he had received news that Peterborough
had caused every pass and town on his way to the west to be fortified
and held by the Miquelets. Philip accompanied the retreating army to
Roussillon. The downfall of his hopes had been utter and complete. But
a few weeks before it had seemed that Spain was his, and that the forces
at his disposal were ample to crush out the insurrection in Barcelona,
and to sweep into the sea the handful of the invaders. But all his plans
had been baffled, all his hopes brought to naught by the genius and
energy of one man, in spite of that man being thwarted at every turn by
the imbecile German coterie who surrounded the king, and by the jealousy
and ill will of his fellow generals.

Bad news met the fugitive at Roussillon. There he heard that his
countrymen had suffered a disastrous defeat at Ramillies; that nearly
all the Netherlands had been wrested from France; that a heavy defeat
had been inflicted upon her at Turin, and that Italy was well nigh lost.
It needed, indeed, but the smallest amount of unanimity, enterprise, and
confidence on the part of the advisers and generals of King Charles to
have placed him securely and permanently upon the throne of Spain.

When the flight of the besieging army was discovered after daybreak by
the besieged, they poured out from Barcelona into the deserted camp. All
the ordnance and stores of the French had been abandoned. Two hundred
heavy brass guns, thirty mortars, and a v