the ailing
to the door of the hospital and there slaughtered them in cold blood;
aye, and here and elsewhere, did other things too dreadful to write
down. Says the old chronicler, "But this being understood by the
women, they assembled all together, making the most pitiful cries and
lamentations that could be heard, the which would have moved a heart of
flint, so as it was not possible to abandon them."

Next another plan was formed: that all the females and helpless should
be set in the centre of a square of the fighting men, to march out
and give battle to the foe till everyone was slain. Then the Spaniards
hearing this and growing afraid of what these desperate men might do,
fell back on guile. If they would surrender, the citizens of Haarlem
were told, and pay two hundred and forty thousand florins, no punishment
should be inflicted. So, having neither food nor hope, they listened
to the voice of the tempter and surrendered, they who had fought until
their garrison of four thousand was reduced to eighteen hundred men.

It was noon and past on the fatal twelfth of July. The gates were open,
the Spaniards, those who were left alive of them, Don Frederic at their
head, with drums beating, banners flying, and swords sharpened for
murder, were marching into the city of Haarlem. In a deep niche between
two great brick piers of the cathedral were gathered four people whom we
know. War and famine had left them all alive, yet they had borne their
share of both. In every enterprise, however desperate, Foy and Martin
had marched, or stood, or watched side by side, and well did the
Spaniards know the weight of the great sword Silence and the red-headed
giant who wielded it. Mother Martha, too, had not been idle. Throughout
the siege she had served as the lieutenant of the widow Hasselaer, who
with a band of three hundred women fought day and night alongside
of their husbands and brothers. Even Elsa, who although she was too
delicate and by nature timid and unfitted to go out to battle, had done
her part, for she laboured at the digging of mines and the building of
walls till her soft hands were rough and scarred.

How changed they were. Foy, whose face had been so youthful, looked now
like a man on the wrong side of middle age. The huge Martin might have
been a great skeleton on which hung clothes, or rather rags and a
rent bull's hide, with his blue eyes shining in deep pits beneath the
massive, projecting skull. Elsa to