The weather that, through the latter part of June and July, had held so fine, had changed at last. With that persistency which for centuries has caused all in the Netherlands to say that their climate is the worst in Europe, or at least the most unreliable, a rainy season had again set in accompanied by considerable cold. The rivers were so swollen now that, in the case of all the great ones, the usually slow, turgid streams had turned into swirling volumes of water, resembling those which, in mountainous regions, pour forth from their icy sources; even the smaller waterways had overflowed their banks and submerged the low-lying fields around them. Thus, except in some particular instances, all military operations had come to an end for the time; the thousands of soldiers who composed the rival armies, and were drawn from half the countries in Europe, lay idle in their tents--when they had any--or in some town they had possessed themselves of; or, in many cases, on the rain-soaked ground. Of these armies none suffered worse than did the principal portion of the English forces--namely, that under the Earl of Marlborough. For the torrid heat of July was all gone now--that heat of which, but a week or so before, Marlborough had made mention in one of his frequent letters to his wife, while adding the hope that it would ripen the fruit in their gardens at St. Albans, the gardens so dear to him since he knew well enough that she walked in them daily and thought always of him. For whatever John Churchill's faults might be, and whatever the faults of his beautiful but shrewish wife might be, neither failed in their absorbing love for one another--the love that had sprung into their hearts when he was but a colonel and gentleman of the bedchamber to the Duke of York and she a maid of honour to the Duchess. The heat and fine weather were gone, and for refuge, there was little but the open left for the English troops. It was true Kaiserswörth was taken at this time, Breda was occupied by the English, Maestricht was the same, and Nimeguen had been long in our hands; but with these exceptions Marlborough, with 60,000 men under his command, lay almost entirely in the open. His lordship was at this time at Grave on the Meuse on his way to Venloo, there to attempt the siege and capture of that town, it lying some forty-five miles south of Grave and fifty miles north of Liége.