w sands, not for a midsummer
holiday, but to join hands in one of the most enduring struggles that
history had yet recorded, and on which the attention of Europe was for a
long time to be steadily fixed.

Ostend--East-end--was the only possession of the republic in Flanders.
Having been at last thoroughly fortified according to the principles of
the age, it was a place whence much damage was inflicted upon the enemy,
and whence forays upon the obedient Flemings could very successfully be
conducted. Being in the hands of so enterprising a naval power, it
controlled the coast, while the cardinal-archduke on the other side
fondly hoped that its possession would give him supremacy on the sea. The
States of Flanders declared it to be a thorn in the Belgic lion's foot,
and called urgently upon their sovereign to remove the annoyance.

They offered Albert 300,000 florins a month so long as the siege should
last, besides an extraordinary sum of 300,000, of which one third was to
be paid when the place should be invested, one-third when the breach had
been made, and one-third after the town had been taken. It was obvious
that, although they thought the extraction of the thorn might prove
troublesome, the process would be accomplished within a reasonable time.
The cardinal-archduke, on his part, was as anxious as the "members" of
Flanders. Asking how long the Duke of Parma had been in taking Antwerp,
and being told "eighteen months," he replied that, if necessary, he was
willing to employ eighteen years in reducing Ostend.

The town thus about to assume so much importance in the world's eye had
about three thousand inhabitants within its lowly; thatch-roofed houses.
It fronted directly upon the seacoast and stretched backward in a
southerly direction, having the sandy downs on the right and left, and a
swampy, spongy soil on the inner verge, where it communicated with the
land. Its northern part, small and scarcely inhabited, was lashed by the
ocean, and exposed to perpetual danger from its storms and flood-tides,
but was partially protected from these encroachments by a dyke stretching
along the coast on the west. Here had hitherto been the harbour formed by
the mouth of the river Iperleda as it mingled with the sea, but this
entrance had become so choked with sand as to be almost useless at low
water. This circumstance would have rendered the labours of the archduke
comparatively easy, and much discouraged the States, had ther