against its ancient masters. The daily 'slaughter had become sickening
to behold. There were three thousand effective men in the garrison.
More could have been sent in to supply the steady depletion in the ranks,
but there was no room for more. There was scarce space enough for the
living to stand to their work, or for the dead to lie in their graves.
And this was an advantage which could not fail to tell. Of necessity the
besiegers would always very far outnumber the garrison, so that the final
success of their repeated assaults became daily more and more possible.

Yet on the 2nd June the enemy met not only with another signal defeat,
but also with a most bitter surprise. On that day the mine which he had
been so long and so laboriously constructing beneath the great Polder
Bulwark was sprung with magnificent effect. A breach, forty feet wide,
was made in this last stronghold of the old defences, and the soldiers
leaped into the crater almost before it had ceased to blaze, expecting
by one decisive storm to make themselves masters at last of all the
fortifications, and therefore of the town itself. But as emerging
from the mine, they sprang exulting upon the shattered bulwark,
a transformation more like a sudden change in some holiday pantomime
than a new fact in this three years' most tragic siege presented itself
to their astonished eyes. They had carried the last defence of the old
counterscarp, and behold--a new one, which they had never dreamed of,
bristling before their eyes, with a flanking battery turned directly upon
them. The musketeers and pikemen, protected by their new works, now
thronged towards the assailants; giving them so hearty a welcome that
they reeled back, discomfited, after a brief but severe struggle, from
the spot of their anticipated triumph, leaving their dead and dying in
the breach.

Four days later, Berendrecht, with a picked party of English troops,