below, in the burgh of Arques, he sent Biron into cantonments with his regiment of Swiss and the companies of French infantry; and he lost no time in having large fosses dug ahead of the burgh, in front of all the approaches, enclosing within an extensive line of circumvallation both burgh and castle. All the king’s soldiers and the peasants that could be picked up in the environs worked night and day. Whilst they were at work, Henry wrote to Countess Corisande de Gramont, his favorite at that time, “My dear heart, it is a wonder I am alive with such work as I have. God have pity upon me and show me mercy, blessing my labors, as He does in spite of a many folks! I am well, and my affairs are going well. I have taken Eu. The enemy, who are double me just now, thought to catch me there; but I drew off towards Dieppe, and I await them in a camp that I am fortifying. Tomorrow will be the day when I shall see them, and I hope, with God’s help, that if they attack me they will find they have made a bad bargain. The bearer of this goes by sea. The wind and my duties make me conclude. This 9th of September, in the trenches at Arques.” All was finished when the scouts of Mayenne appeared. But Mayenne also was an able soldier: he saw that the position the king had taken and the works he had caused to be thrown up rendered a direct attack very difficult. He found means of bearing down upon Dieppe another way, and of placing himself, says the latest historian of Dieppe, M. Vitet, between the king and the town, “hoping to cut off the king’s communications with the sea, divide his forces, deprive him of his re-enforcements from England, and, finally, surround him and capture him, as he had promised the Leaguers of Paris, who were already talking of the iron cage in which the Bearnese would be sent to them. “Henry IV.,” continues M. Vitet, “felt some vexation at seeing his forecasts checkmated by Mayenne’s manoeuvre, and at having had so much earth removed to so little profit; but he was a man of resources, confident as the Gascons are, and with very little of pig-headedness. To change all his plans was with him the work of an instant. Instead of awaiting the foe in his intrenchments, he saw that it was for him to go and feel for them on the other side of the valley, and that, on pain of being invested, he must not leave the Leaguers any exit but the very road they had taken to come.” Having changed all his plans on this new system, Henry breathed more freely; but he did not go to sleep for all that: he was incessantly backwards and forwards from Dieppe to Arques, from Arques to Dieppe and to the Faubourg du Pollet. Mayenne, on the contrary, seemed to have fallen into a lethargy; he had not yet been out of his quarters during the nearly eight and forty hours since he had taken them. On the 17th of September, 1589, in the morning, however, a few hundred light-horse were seen putting themselves in motion, scouring the country