war. But they had
been unceasingly exposed to two tremendous enemies. During each winter
and spring the ocean often smote their bastions and bulwarks in an hour
of wrath till they fell together like children's toys, and it was always
at work, night and day, steadily lapping at the fragile foundations on
which all their structures stood. Nor was it easy to give the requisite
attention to the devouring sea, because all the materials that could be
accumulated seemed necessary to repair the hourly damages inflicted by
their other restless foe.

Thus the day seemed to draw gradually but inexorably nearer when the
place would be, not captured, but consumed. There was nothing for it, so
long as the States were determined to hold the spot, but to meet the
besieger at every point, above or below the earth, and sell every inch of
that little morsel of space at the highest price that brave men could
impose.

So Berendrecht, as vigilant and devoted as even Peter Gieselles had ever
been, now succeeded to the care of the Polders and the Porcupines, and
the Hell's Mouths; and all the other forts, whose quaint designations had
served, as usually is the case among soldiers, to amuse the honest
patriots in the midst of their toils and danger. On the 18th April, the
enemy assailed the great western Ravelin, and after a sanguinary
hand-to-hand action, in which great numbers of officers and soldiers were
lost on both sides, he carried the fort; the Spaniards, Italians,
Germans, and Walloons vieing with each other in deeds of extraordinary
daring, and overcoming at last the resistance of the garrison.

This was an important success. The foe had now worked his way with
galleries and ditches along the whole length of the counterscarp till he
was nearly up with the Porcupine, and it was obvious that in a few days
he would be master of the counterscarp itself.

A less resolute commander, at the head of less devoted troops, might have
felt that when that inevitable event should arrive all that honour
demanded would have been done, and that Spinola was entitled to his city.
Berendrecht simply decided that if the old counterscarp could no longer
be held it was time to build a new counterscarp. This, too, had been for
some time the intention of Prince Maurice. A plan for this work had
already been sent into the place, and a distinguished English engineer,
Ralph Dexter by name, arrived with some able assistants to carry it into
execution. It havi