that portal, along the margin of the moat, and began mining beneath the
inner wall of the city.

Meantime, the garrison had been reduced to four hundred soldiers, nearly
all of whom were wounded: wearied and driven to despair, these soldiers
were willing to treat. The townspeople, however, answered the
proposition with a shout of fury, and protested that they would destroy
the garrison with their own hands if such an insinuation were repeated.
Sebastian Tappin, too, encouraged them with the hope of speedy relief,
and held out to them the wretched consequences of trusting to the mercy
of their foes. The garrison took heart again, while that of the burghers
and their wives had, never faltered. Their main hope now was in a
fortification which they had been constructing inside the Brussels gate
--a demilune of considerable strength. Behind it was a breastwork of
turf and masonry, to serve as a last bulwark when every other defence
should be forced. The whole had been surrounded by a foss thirty feet in
depth, and the besiegers, as they mounted upon the breaches which they
had at last effected in the outer curtain, near the Brussels gate, saw
for the first time this new fortification.

The general condition of the defences, and the disposition of the
inhabitants, had been revealed to Alexander by a deserter from the town.
Against this last fortress the last efforts of the foe were now directed.
Alexander ordered a bridge to be thrown across the city moat. As it was
sixty feet wide and as many deep, and lay directly beneath the guns of
the new demilune, the enterprise was sufficiently hazardous. Alexander
led the way in person, with a mallet in one hand and a mattockin the
other. Two men fell dead instantly, one on his right hand and his left,
while he calmly commenced, in his own person, the driving of the first
piles for the bridge. His soldiers fell fast around him. Count