Those ruins, shapeless now, and undistinguished from the gray crags around them, were then a proud and lordly castle; that huge and rifted pile, that frowns above the lesser fragments, was the square dungeon keep, with battlemented turrets at each aerial angle, and bartizans for shot of arquebuss and musquetoon, and embrasures for heaviest ordnance; while round it swept the massy flankers, with thirteen strong round towers, well garnished with the lighter cannon of the day, sakers and culverins and falcons; and without these, still in concentric circles, half moon and counterscarp and ravelin, glacis and rock-hewn moat—a mighty fortress for the king, whose banner, hoisted there by the fugitives from that disastrous field, still waved defiance to his foemen. It was a bright October morning with which we have to do; the sun was pouring a broad flood of light over the fertile vale, with its green meadowland, its hanging woods, its ruddy cornfields, and its bright river; over the town and castle, crowded, this with fierce steel-clad veterans, mustered beneath the royal standard, that with the yeomanry and burghers, like their more regular comrades, in arms for church and king against the leaguering hosts of Cromwell; over the camp, the lines, the outposts of the Puritans, which hemmed the destined town about with, as it were, a wall of iron. Upon the heights, just to the eastward of the town, the fierce, enthusiastic Lilburne had fixed his quarters, and hoisted the broad red cross of the parliament, and thence, on every side, had drawn his lines about the borough; the bridge and the high road, on the south side, were kept by a brigade of pikes and two strong bands of horse arquebusiers; the meadows and the vale were swept by four full regiments of the far-famed invincibles, the ironsides of Cromwell; the woods were filled with sharp-shooters, the roads blocked up with mounds and trenches, and all the north side of the town exposed to a tremendous fire from fifty wide-mouthed cannon, which, covered from the castle guns by a projecting hillock, battered the dwellings of the hapless burghers without remorse or respite. Nor were the besieged passive in the mean time, or fearful. Bright sheets of flame would leap out, ever and anon, from the dark castle embrasures, and clouds of snow-white smoke would swathe the giant keep in their dense vapory shroud, and with a roar that told the awful tale of civil warfare even to the distant walls of York, the heavy shot would plunge into the serried columns of the leaguers, thinning their ranks indeed, and shaking for a moment their array, but daunting not their fiery courage, nor damping their enthusiastic zeal. And now, with the long roll of drums and the soul-stirring flourish of the horn and bugle, from this point or from that of the beleaguered town, the cavaliers would sally out on their besiegers. Now by some ford of the swift river, neglected