defenders sullenly
withdrew with their wounded to the inner entrenchments.

On the 27th June, Daniel de Hartaing, Lord of Marquette, was sent by the
States-General to take command in Ostend. The colonel of the Walloon
regiment which had rendered such good service on the famous field of
Nieuport, the new governor, with his broad, brown, cheerful face, and his
Milan armour, was a familiar figure enough to the campaigners on both
sides in Flanders or Germany.

The stoutest heart might have sunk at the spectacle which the condition
of the town presented at his first inspection. The States-General were
resolved to hold the place, at all hazards, and Marquette had come to do
their bidding, but it was difficult to find anything that could be called
a town. The great heaps of rubbish, which had once been the outer walls,
were almost entirely in the possession of the foe, who had lodged himself
in all that remained of the defiant Porcupine, the Hell's Mouth, and
other redoubts, and now pointed from them at least fifty great guns
against their inner walls. The old town, with its fortifications, was
completely honeycombed, riddled, knocked to pieces, and, although the
Sand Hill still held out, it was plain enough that its days were numbered
unless help should soon arrive. In truth, it required a clear head and a
practised eye to discover among those confused masses of prostrate
masonry, piles of brick, upturned graves, and mounds of sand and rubbish,
anything like order and regularity. Yet amid the chaos there was really
form and meaning to those who could read aright, and Marquette saw, as
well in the engineers' lines as in the indomitable spirit that looked out
of the grim faces of the garrison, that Ostend, so long as anything of it
existed in nature, could be held for the republic. Their brethren had not
been firmer, when keeping their merry Christmas, seven years before,
under the North Pole, upon a pudding made of the gunner's cartridge
paste, or the Knights of the Invincible Lion in the horrid solitudes of
Tierra del Fuego, than were the defenders of this sandbank.

Whether the place were worth the cost or not, it was for my lords the
States-General to decide, not for Governor Marquette. And the decision of
those "high and mighty" magistrates, to whom even Maurice of Nassau bowed
without a murmur, although often against his judgment, had been plainly
enough announced.

And so shiploads of deals and joists, bricks, nails