The Year of this Volume, and of the Number in question, is 1737; the MUNZE or Medal "recreated upon" in of Henri II.] It had depended upon Albert, who hung in the distance with an army of his own, whether the Siege could even begin; but he joined the Kaiser, being reconciled again; and the trenches opened.

By the valor of Guise and his Chivalry,--still more perhaps by the iron frosts and by the sleety rains of Winter, and the hungers and the hardships of a hundred thousand men, digging vainly at the ice-bound earth, or trampling it when sleety into seas of mud, and themselves sinking in it, of dysentery, famine, toil and despair, as they cannonaded day and night,--Metz could not be taken.

"Impossible!" said the Generals with one voice, after trying it for a couple of months.

"Try it one other ten days," said the Kaiser with a gloomy fixity; "let us all die, or else do it!" They tried, with double desperation, another ten days; cannon booming through the winter midnight far and wide, four score miles round: "Cannot be done, your Majesty! Cannot,--the winter and the mud, and Guise and the walls; man's strength cannot do it in this season.

We must march away!" Karl listened in silence; but the tears were seen to run down his proud face, now not so young as it once was: "Let us march, then!" he said, in a low voice, after some pause.
Alcibiades covered the retreat to Diedenhof (THIONVILLE they now call it): outmanoeuvred the French, retreated with success; he had already captured a grand Due d'Aumale, a Prince of the Guises,--valuable ransom to be looked for there.