eantime a council, summoned by Marquette, of all the officers, decided
that Ostend must be abandoned now that Ostend had ceased to exist.

On the 20th September the Accord was signed with Spinola. The garrison
were to march out with their arms. They were to carry off four cannon but
no powder. All clerical persons were to leave the place, with their goods
and chattels. All prisoners taken on both sides during the siege were to
be released. Burghers, sutlers, and others, to go whither they would,
undisturbed. And thus the archdukes, after three years and seventy-seven
days of siege, obtained their prize. Three thousand men, in good health,
marched out of little Troy with the honours of war. The officers were
entertained by Spinola and his comrades at a magnificent banquet, in
recognition of the unexampled heroism with which the town had been
defended. Subsequently the whole force marched to the headquarters of the
States' army in and about Sluys. They were received by Prince Maurice,
who stood bareheaded and surrounded by his most distinguished officers;
to greet them and to shake them warmly by the hand. Surely no defeated
garrison ever deserved more respect from friend or foe.

The Archduke Albert and the Infants Isabella entered the place in
triumph, if triumph it could be called. It would be difficult to imagine
a more desolate scene. The artillery of the first years of the
seventeenth century was not the terrible enginry of destruction that it
has become in the last third of the nineteenth, but a cannonade,
continued so steadily and so long, had done its work. There were no
churches, no houses, no redoubts, no bastions, no walls, nothing but a
vague and confused mass of ruin. Spinola conducted his imperial guests
along the edge of extinct volcanoes, amid upturned cemeteries, through
quagmires which once were moats, over huge mounds of sand, and vast
shapeless masses of bricks and masonry, which had been forts. He
endeavoured to point out places where mines had been exploded, where
ravelins had been stormed, where the assailants had been successful, and
where they had been bloodily repulsed. But it was all loathsome, hideous
rubbish. There were no human habitations, no hovels, no casemates. The
inhabitants had burrowed at last in the earth, like the dumb creatures of
the swamps and forests. In every direction the dykes had burst, and the
sullen wash of the liberated waves, bearing hither and thither the
floating wrec