The next morning a flag of truce came to ask for terms, and the town surrendered on condition of the garrison going out with their arms and their private property. We went out to see them defile past the Prince and his staff. The poor fellows were in rags, and the bundles they carried on their backs contained everything they had in the world. Wives and children in numbers followed or preceded, and to our attempts to show them little kindnesses they shrank from us as if we had been wolves, the children generally howling with fear when we offered them a biscuit or a coin. One of our battalions escorted them through the narrows of the Duga, and, when they reached the wild and bosky gorge which makes its strongest position, the women stopped in a paralysis of panic, asking if this was the place where they were to be butchered, so completely had the Turkish authorities impressed on them the fiction of infallible slaughter for all who fell into the hands of the Montenegrins. The Prince gave the inhabitants four days to choose whether they would stay and become his subjects or take all their possessions and go to Albania. The most had decided to stay, when word was sent them from Spuz that all who accepted the protection of the Prince would be expelled and have all their property confiscated when the Turks returned, and many were frightened into revocation of their submission. Some were as irreconcilable as wolves, and would not endure conversation with us. I found a little fellow, about five or six, pasturing a lamb in the outskirts of the town, and tried, with the aid of the interpreter, to enter into conversation with him, but to no effect. He repelled every advance, and, when I offered him a piastre, he refused it with a savage dignity, saying that he had money of his own and did not want mine. We took an immense booty in provisions, artillery (nineteen guns), tents, and war material, left by Suleiman in the expectation of returning after he had made the conquest of Montenegro. Ammunition there was none, for the artillery had been supplied with old muzzle-loading pistol and other cartridges broken up for the last weeks of the siege. And so ended the contest of four hundred years.