ng been estimated that the labour would take three
weeks of time, without more ado the inner line was carefully drawn,
cutting off with great nicety and precision about one half the whole
place. Within this narrowed circle the same obstinate resistance was to
be offered as before, and the bastions and redoubts of the new
entrenchment were to be baptized with the same uncouth names which two
long years of terrible struggle had made so precious. The work was very
laborious; for the line was drawn straight through the town, and whole
streets had to be demolished and the houses to their very foundations
shovelled away. Moreover the men were forced to toil with spade in one
hand and matchlock in the other, ever ready to ascend from the ancient
dilapidated cellars in order to mount the deadly breach at any point in
the whole circumference of the place.

It became absolutely necessary therefore to send a sufficient force of
common workmen into the town to lighten the labours of the soldiers.
Moreover the thought, although whistled to the wind, would repeatedly
recur, that, after all, there must be a limit to these operations, and
that at last there would remain no longer any earth in which to find a
refuge.

The work of the new entrenchment went slowly on, but it was steadily
done. Meantime they were comforted by hearing that the stadholder had
taken the field in Flanders, at the head of a considerable force, and
they lived in daily expectation of relief. It will be necessary, at the
proper moment, to indicate the nature of Prince Maurice's operations. For
the present, it is better that the reader should confine his attention
within the walls of Ostend.

By the 11th May, the enemy had effected a lodgment in a corner of the
Porcupine, and already from that point might threaten the new
counterscarp before it should be completed. At the same time he had
gnawed through to the West Bulwark, and was busily mining under the
Porcupine itself. In this fort friend and foe now lay together, packed
like herrings, and profited by their proximity to each other to vary the
monotony of pike and anaphance with an occasional encounter of epistolary
wit.

Thus Spanish letters, tied to sticks, and tossed over into the next
entrenchment, were replied to by others, composed in four languages by
the literary man of Ostend, Auditor Fleming, and shot into the enemy's
trenches on cross-bow bolts.

On the 29th May, a long prepared mine was sprung