side of her well-beloved Albert, making her appearance there in great
state, with eighteen coaches full of ladies of honour, and always
manifesting much impatience if she did not hear the guns.

She would frequently touch off a forty-pounder with her own serene
fingers in order to encourage the artillerymen, and great was the
enthusiasm which such condescension excited.

Assaults, sorties, repulses, ambuscades were also of daily occurrence,
and often with very sanguinary results; but it would be almost as idle
now to give the details of every encounter that occurred, as to describe
the besieging of a snow-fort by schoolboys.

It is impossible not to reflect that a couple of Parrots and a Monitor or
two would have terminated the siege in half an hour in favor of either
party, and levelled the town or the besiegers' works as if they had been
of pasteboard.

Bucquoy's dyke was within a thousand yards of the harbour's entrance, yet
the guns on his platform never sank a ship nor killed a man on board,
while the archduke's batteries were even nearer their mark. Yet it was
the most prodigious siege of modern days. Fifty great guns were in
position around the place, and their balls weighed from ten to forty
pounds apiece. It was generally agreed that no such artillery practice
had ever occurred before in the world.

For the first six months, and generally throughout the siege, there was
fired on an average a thousand of such shots a day. In the sieges of the
American civil war there were sometimes three thousand shots an hour, and
from guns compared to which in calibre and power those cannon and demi-