But what a spectacle they themselves to those inside it, to the hundreds, nay thousands, who gazed off and out from turret, wall, and window! The first glimpse got of them was by the warder in the Castle's keep, just as the brightening sky enabled him to descry objects at a distance. Then other sentries saw them from the watch towers of the gates on that side; and the signal of alarm ran along the line of fortification, round and round. Soon bells rang, trumpets brayed, and drums beat all over the city, startling the citizens out of their sleep and beds. Before the sun had yet shown above the horizon, not one but was awake, and most out of doors. Men rushed wildly through the streets--women too--or stood aperch, clustering on every eminence, every pinnacle and parapet thick as bees, with eager, anxious glances scanning the country outside. At length to fix them on the long, glittering line--for the sheen of the cuirasses were not all gone--that now approached in slow, laboured pace, as the crawl of a scotched snake. When near enough for the bare heads and battered helmets to be distinguished, the blood smouches on dress, arms, and accoutrements, the gloom on brows and in eyes, with lips compressed and features hard set as in sullen anger--when these sure insignia of disaster were fully before them, a feeling of despondency came over the hearts of the Bristolians. Intensified, doubled, when at the head of this figment of a force, crushed and shattered, they saw Sir William Waller, and by his side Sir Arthur Hesselrig--the two leaders so long victorious as to be deemed invincible! They had seen them ride out with an army numbering nigh 6,000 men, and now saw them returning, in retreat, with but a bare hundred! These so down-looking and dispirited, that, as Waller himself--candid as he was brave--confessed in his report to the Lord General, "a corporal with an ordinary squadron could have routed them." To many who witnessed their re-entry within Bristol's gates it was as much spectre as spectacle--the presentiment of misfortune for themselves.