and effects, and take flight before the siege began: of those that remained, many were engaged in the defence; but faction and disunion sadly weakened their ranks, and the Hospitallers, though nominally masters of the city, had little power to maintain order and discipline among the various nations and parties that made up its population. By common consent, Peter de Beaujeu, grand master of the Templars, was elected governor of the city; and whatever may be said of the jealousies of the two orders, it is certain that the most perfect union existed between them during the whole of this memorable siege. The sultan Kelaoun had expired at Cairo whilst actively preparing to set out for Acre. Before his death he exacted a solemn promise from his son never to celebrate his funeral until he should have taken the Christian city, and put all its inhabitants to the sword. Melec Seraf took the oath with right good will, and sent a host of sappers and miners before him to prepare the ground; and every day during the long month of March the Christians had watched the ground from Carmel to the sea-shore broken up by new intrenchments, and the camp filling with the reinforcements that were constantly coming in, not from Egypt alone, but from Arabia and the provinces of the Euphrates, till the vast plain glittered with the multitudes that covered it; their golden targets and polished lance-points resembling (says Michaud) “the shining stars on a serene night; and on the hosts’ advancing, it was like a forest for the multitude of the lances held aloft:” and well it might be, for they were more than 400,000 fighting men, and they covered the entire plain. A little before sunset, the sultan rode out, surrounded by his officers, to survey his thirty miles of intrenchments filled with troops whose arms had as yet been found irresistible; and when he compared his host of combatants with the contemptible size of the city, the weakness of whose defenders was well known to him, it seemed to him that the very idea of resistance was somewhat laughable, and he gave orders for a peremptory summons to surrender; but there was neither answer nor movement on the part of the Christians, and the night passed in silence on both sides. The rosy dawn was streaking the sky just above those low hills that rose dark against the eastern horizon, when the silence was broken by a hideous crash. The smoke and dust cleared away, and you might see a mass of crumbling ruins where but a moment before rose the stately ramparts of the city. Then a loud cry from the ranks of the Saracens, a pell-mell charge towards the spot, and a pause as they reached the verge of a wide, deep ditch which a curve in the ground till then had concealed from view. There was a bloody struggle on its edge; and the infidels were forced to retire, leaving five thousand corpses on the ruined breach. But what were five thousand men to such a host as theirs? Such a repulse hardly seemed a check; and the word sped