But Parma was beforehand with them. Notwithstanding his rage and
mortification that Spanish soldiers should have ignominiously lost the
important fortress which Richebourg had conquered so brilliantly nine
months before, he was not the man to spend time in unavailing regrets.
His quick eye instantly, detected the flaw which might soon be fatal.
In the very same night of the loss of Liefkenshoek, he sent as strong a
party as could be spared, with plenty of sappers and miners, in flat-
bottomed boats across from Kalloo. As the morning dawned, an improvised
fortress, with the Spanish flag waving above its bulwarks, stood on the
broken end of the dyke. That done, he ordered one of the two captains
who had commanded in Liefkenshoek and Saint Anthony to be beheaded on the
same dyke. The other was dismissed with ignominy. Ostend was, of
course, given up; "but it was not a small matter," said Parma, "to
fortify ourselves that very night upon the ruptured place, and so prevent
the rebels from doing it, which would have been very mal-a-propos."

Nevertheless, the rebels had achieved a considerable success; and now or
never the telling blow, long meditated, was to be struck.

There lived in Antwerp a subtle Mantuan, Gianibelli by name, who had
married and been long settled in the city. He had made himself busy with
various schemes for victualling the place. He had especially urged upon
the authorities, at an early period of the siege, the propriety of making
large purchases of corn and storing it in magazines at a time when
famine-price had by no means been reached. But the leading men had then
their heads full of a great ship, or floating castle, which they were
building, and which they had pompously named the 'War's End,' 'Fin de la
Guerre.' We shall hear something of this phenomenon at a later period.
Meanwhile, Gianibelli, who knew something of shipbuilding, as he did of