by the Empire were not forthcoming, though messenger after messenger was sent to hurry their advance. Even the Bohemian troops approached but by slow marches, under their leader John of Bernstein, and required every exhortation to greater diligence. At length Duke Frederick of the Palatinate, the prince elected as leader of the army of the Empire, arrived on the 24th of September at Lintz with the scanty levies, amounting to a few thousands, which had as yet been collected. At Lintz he held conference with Ferdinand as to the measures to be pursued, and then hastened forward to effect his entrance into Vienna before the arrival of the Turks. On the 26th, however, he received at Grein the intelligence that the Turks had appeared in force in the neighbourhood of the city. He was at first resolutely determined to cut his way at all hazards, but when he learned that both the bridges over the Danube were in possession of the enemy, being satisfied that by the attempt he could only involve his feeble forces in certain and useless destruction, he determined to halt at Crems for reinforcements. His cousin, however, the brave Pfalzgraf Philip, succeeded in throwing himself into the city, with a small number of Spanish and German troops, three days before it was surrounded by the Turks. In Vienna the necessary preparations had now been made with almost superhuman exertion, but in such haste and with so little material, that they could only be considered as very inadequate to the emergency. The city itself occupied then the same ground as at present, the defences were old and in great part ruinous, the walls scarcely six feet thick, and the outer palisade so frail and insufficient that the name _Stadtzaun_, or city hedge, which it bears in the municipal records of the time, was literally as well as figuratively appropriate. The citadel was merely the old building which now exists under the name of Schweizer Hof. All the houses which lay too near the wall were levelled to the ground; where the wall was specially weak or out of repair, a new entrenched line of earthen defence was constructed and well palisaded; within the city itself, from the Stuben to the Kärnthner or Carinthian gate, an entirely new wall twenty feet high was constructed with a ditch interior to the old. The bank of the Danube was also entrenched and palisaded, and from the drawbridge to the Salz gate protected with a rampart capable of resisting artillery. As a precaution against fire the shingles with which the houses were generally roofed were throughout the city removed. The pavement of the streets was taken up to deaden the effect of the enemy’s shot, and watchposts established to guard against conflagration. Parties were detached to scour the neighbouring country in search of provisions, and to bring in cattle and forage. Finally, to provide against the possibility of a protracted siege, useless consumers, women, children,