him. "No, stay here," said Romara. "I think you are a man who won't
give ground." He had not seen either Rinaldo or Ammiani, but spoke of
both as certain to be rescued.

Rain and cannon filled the weary space of that day. Some of the
barricades fronting the city gates had been battered down by nightfall;
they were restored within an hour. Their defenders entered the houses
right and left during the cannonade, waiting to meet the charge; but the
Austrians held off. "They have no plan," Romara said on his second visit
of inspection; "they are waiting on Fortune, and starve meanwhile. We
can beat them at that business."

Romara took Angelo and his Swiss away with him. The interior of the city
was abandoned by the Imperialists, who held two or three of the principal
buildings and the square of the Duomo. Clouds were driving thick across
the cold-gleaming sky when the storm-bells burst out with the wild
Jubilee-music of insurrection--a carol, a jangle of all discord, savage
as flame. Every church of the city lent its iron tongue to the peal; and
now they joined and now rolled apart, now joined again and clanged like
souls shrieking across the black gulfs of an earthquake; they swam aloft
with mournful delirium, tumbled together, were scattered in spray,
dissolved, renewed, died, as a last worn wave casts itself on an unfooted
shore, and rang again as through rent doorways, became a clamorous host,
an iron body, a pressure as of a down-drawn firmament, and once more a
hollow vast, as if the abysses of the Circles were sounded through and
through. To the Milanese it was an intoxication; it was the howling of
madness to the Austrians--a torment and a terror: they could neither
sing, nor laugh, nor talk under it. Where they stood in the city, the
troops could barely hear their officers' call of command. No sooner had
the bells broken out than the length of every street and Corso flashed