On the 20th September the Accord was signed with Spinola.  The garrison were to march out with their arms.  They were to carry off four cannon but no powder.  All clerical persons were to leave the place, with their goods and chattels.  All prisoners taken on both sides during the siege were to be released.  Burghers, sutlers, and others, to go whither they would, undisturbed.  And thus the archdukes, after three years and seventy-seven days of siege, obtained their prize.  Three thousand men, in good health, marched out of little Troy with the honours of war.  The officers were entertained by Spinola and his comrades at a magnificent banquet, in recognition of the unexampled heroism with which the town had been defended.  Subsequently the whole force marched to the headquarters of the States’ army in and about Sluys.  They were received by Prince Maurice, who stood bareheaded and surrounded by his most distinguished officers; to greet them and to shake them warmly by the hand.  Surely no defeated garrison ever deserved more respect from friend or foe.

The Archduke Albert and the Infants Isabella entered the place in triumph, if triumph it could be called.  It would be difficult to imagine a more desolate scene.  The artillery of the first years of the seventeenth century was not the terrible enginry of destruction that it has become in the last third of the nineteenth, but a cannonade, continued so steadily and so long, had done its work.  There were no churches, no houses, no redoubts, no bastions, no walls, nothing but a vague and confused mass of ruin.  Spinola conducted his imperial guests along the edge of extinct volcanoes, amid upturned cemeteries, through quagmires which once were moats, over huge mounds of sand, and vast shapeless masses of bricks and masonry, which had been forts.  He endeavoured to point out places where mines had been exploded, where ravelins had been stormed, where the assailants had been successful, and where they had been bloodily repulsed.  But it was all loathsome, hideous rubbish.  There were no human habitations, no hovels, no casemates.  The inhabitants had burrowed at last in the earth, like the dumb creatures of the swamps and forests.  In every direction the dykes had burst, and the sullen wash of the liberated waves, bearing hither and thither the floating wreck of fascines and machinery, of planks and building materials, sounded far and wide over what should have been dry land.  The great ship channel, with the unconquered Half-moon upon one side and the incomplete batteries and platforms of Bucquoy on the other, still defiantly opened its passage to the sea, and the retiring fleets of the garrison were white in the offing.  All around was the grey expanse of stormy ocean, without a cape or a headland to break its monotony, as the surges rolled mournfully in upon a desolation more dreary than their own.  The atmosphere was mirky and surcharged with rain, for the wild equinoctial storm which had held Maurice