commandant of the little garrison, Ripperda, had assembled the citizens
and soldiers in the market-place. He warned them of the absolute
necessity to make a last effort for freedom. In startling colors he held
up to them the fate of Mechlin, of Zutphen, of Naarden, as a prophetic
mirror, in which they might read their own fate should they be base
enough to surrender the city. There was no composition possible, he
urged, with foes who were as false as they were sanguinary, and whose
foul passions were stimulated, not slaked, by the horrors with which they
had already feasted themselves.

Ripperda addressed men who could sympathize with his bold and lofty
sentiments. Soldiers and citizens cried out for defence instead of
surrender, as with one voice, for there were no abject spirits at Harlem,
save among the magistracy; and Saint Aldegonde, the faithful minister of
Orange, was soon sent to Harlem by the Prince to make a thorough change
in that body.

Harlem, over whose ruins the Spanish tyranny intended to make its
entrance into Holland, lay in the narrowest part of that narrow isthmus
which separates the Zuyder Zee from the German Ocean. The distance from
sea to sea is hardly five English miles across. Westerly from the city
extended a slender strip of land, once a morass, then a fruitful meadow;
maintained by unflagging fortitude in the very jaws of a stormy ocean.
Between the North Sea and the outer edge of this pasture surged those
wild and fantastic downs, heaped up by wind and wave in mimicry of
mountains; the long coils of that rope of sand, by which, plaited into
additional strength by the slenderest of bulrushes, the waves of the
North Sea were made to obey the command of man. On the opposite, or
eastern aide, Harlem looked towards Amsterdam. That already flourishing
city was distant but ten miles. The two cities were separated by an