the latter in surveying the movements of the Turkish camp, and watching for the first gleam of the Christian weapons as they issued from the wooded heights. The commandant, as evening closed in, despatched a messenger, who swam the Danube with a letter for the Duke of Lorraine. Its words were few. “No time to be lost!—no time indeed to be lost!” This message was acknowledged by a cluster of rockets from Hermansdorf. Orders were now issued by Count Stahremberg to all the troops, regular and irregular, to hold themselves in readiness for a sally during the expected battle of the morrow, or for joining the Christian army, and driving the Turks out of the approaches. The night of the 11th of September closed in upon this troubled scene. The man whose doom is sealed will often sleep till morning calls him to the scaffold. Such heavy sleep as his, the offspring of nervous excitement and exhaustion, perhaps, was granted to the citizen of Vienna; but even this may be doubted, for the criminal is assured of his fate. The doom of Vienna was yet uncertain. FOOTNOTES: [14] See Appendix. CHAPTER XV. September 12. At sunrise of the 12th September, the crest of the Kahlenberg was concealed by one of those autumnal mists which give promise of a genial, perhaps a sultry day, and which, clinging to the wooded flanks of the acclivity, grew denser as it descended, till it rested heavily on the shores and the stream itself of the river below. From that summit the usual fiery signals of distress had been watched through the night by many an eye as they rose incessantly from the tower of St. Stephen, and now the fretted spire of that edifice, so long the target of the ineffectual fire of the Turkish artillerists, was faintly distinguished rising from a sea of mist. As the hour wore on, and the exhalation dispersed, a scene was disclosed which must have made those who witnessed it from the Kahlenberg tighten their saddle-girths or look to their priming. A practised eye glancing over the fortifications of the city could discern from the Burg to the Scottish gate an interruption of their continuity, a shapeless interval of rubbish and of ruin, which seemed as if a battalion might enter it abreast. In face of this desolation a labyrinth of lines extended itself, differing in design from the rectilinear zigzag of a modern approach, and formed of short curves overlapping each other, to use a comparison of some writers of the time, like the scales of a fish. In these, the Turkish lines, the miner yet crawled to his task, and the storming parties were still arrayed by order of the Vizier, ready for a renewal of the assault so often repeated in vain. The camp behind had been evacuated by the fighting men; the horse-tails had been plucked from before the tents of the Pachas, but their harems still tenanted the canvass city; masses of Christian captives awaited there their doom in chains; camels and drivers and camp followers still peopled the long streets of