There had been other visitors in Maurice's lines before Grave at about
the same period. Among others, Gaston Spinola, recently created by the
archduke Count of Bruay, had obtained permission to make a visit to a
wounded relative, then a captive in the republican camp, and was
hospitably entertained at the stadholder's table. Maurice, with
soldierly bluntness, ridiculed the floating batteries, the castles on
wheels, the sausages, and other newly-invented machines, employed before
Ostend, and characterized them as rather fit to catch birds with than to
capture a city, defended by mighty armies and fleets.

"If the archduke has set his heart upon it, he had far better try to buy
Ostend," he observed.

"What is your price?" asked the Italian; "will you take 200,000 ducats?"

"Certainly not less than a million and a half," was the reply; so highly
did Maurice rate the position and advantages of the city. He would
venture to prophesy, he added, that the siege of Ostend would last as
long as the siege of Troy.

"Ostend is no Troy," said Spinola with a courtly flourish, "although
there are certainly not wanting an Austrian Agamemnon, a Dutch Hector,
and an Italian Achilles." The last allusion was to the speaker's
namesake and kinsman, the Marquis Anibrose Spinola, of whom much was to
be heard in the world from that time forth.

Meantime, although so little progress had been made at Ostend, Maurice
had thoroughly done his work before Grave. On the 18th September the
place surrendered, after sixty days' siege, upon the terms usually