even
the smith.

An unparalleled massacre began. Adam seeing a frantic horde rush into the
houses, remembered Ruth, and half mad with terror hastened back to the
smithy, where he told those left behind what he had witnessed. Then,
arming himself and his journeymen with weapons forged by his own hand, he
hurried out with them to renew the fight.

Hours elapsed; the noise, the firing, the ringing of the alarm bells
still continued; smoke and the smell of fire penetrated through the doors
and windows.

Evening came, and the richest, most flourishing commercial capital in the
world was here a heap of ashes, there a ruin, everywhere a plundered
treasury.

Once the occupants of the smith's shop heard a band of murderers raging
and shouting outside of the smithy; but they passed by, and all day long
no others entered the quiet street, which was inhabited only by workers
in metal.

Ruth and old Rahel had remained behind, under the protection of the brave
foreman. Adam had told them to fly to the cellar, if any uproar arose
outside the door. Ruth wore a dagger, determined in the worst extremity
to turn it against her own breast. What did she care for life, since
Ulrich had perished!

Old Rahel, an aged dame of eighty, paced restlessly, with bowed figure,
through the large room, saying compassionately, whenever her eyes met the
girl's: "Ulrich, our Ulrich!" then, straightening herself and looking
upward. She no longer knew what had happened a few hours before, yet her
memory faithfully retained the incidents that occurred many years
previous. The maidservant, a native of Antwerp, had rushed home to her
parents when the tumult began.

As the day drew towards a close, the panes were less frequently shaken by
the thunder of the artillery, the noise in the streets diminished, but
the house became more and more filled with suffocating smoke.

Night came, the lamp was lighted, the women started at every new sound,
but anxiety for Adam now overpowered every other feeling in Ruth's mind.
Just then the door opened, and the smith's deep voice called in the
vestibule: "It is I! Don't be frightened, it is I!"

He had gone out with five journeymen: he returned with two. The others
lay slain in the streets, and with them Count Oberstein's soldiers, the
only ones who had stoutly resisted the Spanish mutineers and their allies
to the last man.

Adam had swung his hammer on the Mere and by the Zucker Canal among the
citizens, who fo