dividual conscience and private worship within individual
households would be tolerated, and there was no papal legate with fiery
eloquence persuading a city full of heroic dupes that it was more
virtuous for men or women to eat their own children than to forego one
high mass, or to wink at a single conventicle.

After all, it was no such bitter hardship for the citizens of
Gertruydenberg to participate in the prosperity of the rising and
thriving young republic, and to enjoy those municipal and national
liberties which her sister cities had found so sweet.

Nothing could be calmer or more reasonable than such a triumph, nothing
less humiliating or less disastrous than such a surrender.

The problem was solved, the demonstration was made. To open their gates
to the soldiers of the Union was not to admit the hordes of a Spanish
commander with the avenging furies of murder, pillage, rape, which ever
followed in their train over the breach of a captured city.

To an enemy bated or dreaded to the uttermost mortal capacity, that
well-fortified and opulent city might have held out for months, and only
when the arms and the fraud of the foe without, and of famine within, had
done their work, could it have bowed its head to the conqueror, and
submitted to the ineffable tortures which would be the necessary
punishment of its courage.

Four thousand shots had been fired from the siege-guns upon the city, and
three hundred upon the relieving force.

The besieging army numbered in all nine thousand one hundred and fifty
men of all arms, and they lost during the eighty-five days' siege three
hundred killed and four hundred wounded.

After the conclusion of these operations, and the thorough remodelling of
the municipal government of the important city thus regained to the
republic, Maurice occupied himself with recruiting and refreshing his
somewhat exhausted little army. On the other hand, old Count Mansfeld,
dissatisfied with the impotent conclusion to his attempts, retired to
Brussels to be much taunted by the insolent Fuentes. He at least escaped
very violent censure on the part of his son Charles, for that general,
after his superfluous conquest of Noyon, while returning towards the
Netherlands, far too tardily to succour Gertruydenberg, had been
paralyzed in all his movements by a very extensive mutiny which broke out
among the Spanish troops in the province of Artois. The disorder went
through all its regular forms. A