upon the whole of them. "Whereupon," said poor blood-councillor
Longehaye, in his letter to his colleagues, "I retired, I leave you to
guess how."

Thus the work went on day after day, month after month. Till the 27th
August of the following year (1573) the executioner never rested, and
when Requesens, successor to Alva, caused the prisons of Mons to be
opened, there were found still seventy-five individuals condemned to the
block, and awaiting their fate.

It is the most dreadful commentary upon the times in which these
transactions occurred, that they could sink so soon into oblivion.
The culprits took care to hide the records of their guilt, while
succeeding horrors, on a more extensive scale, at other places, effaced
the memory of all these comparatively obscure murders and spoliations.
The prosperity of Mons, one of the most flourishing and wealthy
manufacturing towns in the Netherlands, was annihilated, but there were
so many cities in the same condition that its misery was hardly
remarkable. Nevertheless, in our own days, the fall of a mouldering
tower in the ruined Chateau de Naast at last revealed the archives of all
these crimes. How the documents came to be placed there remains a
mystery, but they have at last been brought to light.

The Spaniards had thus recovered Mons, by which event the temporary
revolution throughout the whole Southern Netherlands was at an end.
The keys of that city unlocked the gates of every other in Brabant and
Flanders. The towns which had so lately embraced the authority of Orange
now hastened to disavow the Prince, and to return to their ancient,
hypocritical, and cowardly allegiance. The new oaths of fidelity were
in general accepted by Alva, but the beautiful archiepiscopal city of