besiegers slowly worked their way towards the Tongres gate, while at the
same time the more ostensible operations were in the opposite direction.
The besieged had their miners also, for the peasants in the city had been
used to work with mattock and pickaxe. The women, too, enrolled
themselves into companies, chose their officers--or "mine-mistresses," as
they were called--and did good service daily in the caverns of the earth.
Thus a whole army of gnomes were noiselessly at work to destroy and
defend the beleaguered city. The mine advanced towards the gate; the
besieged delved deeper, and intersected it with a transverse excavation,
and the contending forces met daily, in deadly encounter, within these
sepulchral gangways. Many stratagems were, mutually employed. The
citizens secretly constructed a dam across the Spanish mine, and then
deluged their foe with hogsheads of boiling water. Hundreds were thus
scalded to death. They heaped branches and light fagots in the hostile
mine, set fire to the pile, and blew thick volumes of smoke along the
passage with organ-bellows brought from the churches for the purpose.
Many were thus suffocated. The discomfited besiegers abandoned the mine
where they had met with such able countermining, and sunk another shaft,
at midnight, in secret, at a long distance from the Tongres gate. Still
towards that point, however, they burrowed in the darkness; guiding
themselves to their destination with magnet, plumbline and level, as the
mariner crosses the trackless ocean with compass and chart. They worked
their way, unobstructed, till they arrived at their subterranean port,
directly beneath the doomed ravelin. Here they constructed a spacious
chamber, supporting it with columns, and making all their architectural
arrangements with as much precision and elegance as if their object had
been purely esthetic. Coffers full of powder, to an enormous amount,
were then placed in every direction across the floor, the train was laid,
and Parma informed that all was ready. Alexander, having already arrayed
the troops destined for the assault, then proceeded in person to the