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 beneath the Porcupine.
It did its work effectively, and the 29 May assailants did theirs no less
admirably, crowding into the breach with headlong ferocity, and after a
long and sanguinary struggle with immense lose on both sides, carrying
the precious and long-coveted work by storm. Inch by inch the defenders
were thus slowly forced back toward their new entrenchment. On the same
day, however, they inflicted a most bloody defeat upon the enemy in an
attempt to carry the great Polder. He withdrew, leaving heaps of slain,
so that the account current for the day would have balanced itself, but
that the Porcupine, having changed hands, now bristled