rights of individual conscience and private worship within individual
households would be tolerated, and there was no papal legate with fiery
eloquence persuading a city full of heroic dupes that it was more
virtuous for men or women to eat their own children than to forego one
high mass, or to wink at a single conventicle.

After all, it was no such bitter hardship for the citizens of
Gertruydenberg to participate in the prosperity of the rising and
thriving young republic, and to enjoy those municipal and national
liberties which her sister cities had found so sweet.

Nothing could be calmer or more reasonable than such a triumph, nothing
less humiliating or less disastrous than such a surrender.

The problem was solved, the demonstration was made. To open their gates
to the soldiers of the Union was not to admit the hordes of a Spanish
commander with the avenging furies of murder, pillage, rape, which ever
followed in their train over the breach of a captured city.

To an enemy bated or dreaded to the uttermost mortal capacity, that well-
fortified and opulent city might have held out for months, and only when
the arms and the fraud of the foe without, and of famine within, had done
their work, could it have bowed its head to the conqueror, and submitted
to the ineffable tortures which would be the necessary punishment of its
courage.

Four thousand shots had been fired from the siege-guns upon the city, and
three hundred upon the relieving force.

The besieging army numbered in all nine thousand one hundred and fifty