iner, who, with the assistance of
several others, was carrying a great palisade past the spot where the
children stood, 'please have you seen anything of my father? I've
brought him a can of warm soup.'

'Warm soup!' said the man jocosely; 'why, the enemy cook enough of that
for us, only they warm us in rather a different way. Well, child, your
father is down in the moat with a lot of other men, bringing in wood
that the enemy had piled up ready to burn us out. When they found
their cannon could not knock a hole through at the Peter Gate here,
they thought they would have a try what fire could do.'

'It looks,' said another, 'very much as if the enemy read their Bibles.
Wasn't that what Abimelech did when he couldn't get round the people of
Sichem any other way?'

'Ah, but when he tried it again at another place,' laughed Wahle, 'a
woman dropped a stone on his head from the top of the tower, and that
finished him.'

'May the same fate soon overtake Torstenson!' said a third.

'Oh, he'll never venture up here,' said Wahle. 'Don't you know the
gout has him in tight grips? why, he can't even stir out of his
arm-chair. His people have to play cat's paw for him, and burn their
fingers just when he bids them.'

'I just wish,' said the other, 'that Torstenson might go into such a
rage at not taking the town, that the gout might rise into his body.
Then he would die, and a good thing for us!'

'Come, come!' said Wahle more seriously; 'we ought not to wish even our
enemies such evil as that.'

The words were hardly uttered when a dozen musket-shots rang out from
without the wall that surrounded the moat. Several balls whistled over
the heads of the two children, and the miner who had just been rebuked
fell with a cry of, 'Oh, I am killed!'

His comrades laid down the palisade they were carrying, picked up the
wounded man, and bore him into the nearest covered way, where they laid
him for the time in a sheltered corner. The two children, more
frightened at the sight of the man's fall than at their own danger,
were quite at a loss which way to go next. In another moment, however,
Dollie forgot all her trouble as she caught sight of her father coming
towards her, his arquebuse in his hand.

'You here, little one!' he cried, and hastily drew the children with
him into the gallery, behind the protecting walls of which the
combatants found shelter from the enemy's fire. 'A queer kind of
supper,' he said, as he ha