The year before the siege of Leyden, Haarlem suffered a siege under Frederic of Toledo, the son of the Spaniard, Alva; but Haarlem was not so fortunate as her sister city. After bravely maintaining the place against the enemy for a period of seven weary months, with odds of seven to one against them, the Prince of Orange, with heavy heart, sent a message asking the commandant to make the best terms he would with the Spaniards and surrender, the many attempts of the Prince to rescue the city having proved futile. The massacre that followed the surrender was too shocking to bear the telling of in detail. The garrison and its commandant, the Protestant clergy, and 2,000 or more burghers were cruelly butchered by the Spaniards. Alva himself, however, was forced to admit to Philip that “never was a place defended with such skill and bravery as Haarlem”; not only the men of the town, little accustomed to arms, but the women also had taken an active part in Haarlem’s defense, and Kenau Hasselaer, “a widow of distinguished family and unblemished reputation, about forty-seven years of age, who, at the head of her amazons” (some three hundred or more) “participated in many of the most fiercely contested actions of the siege, both within and without the walls.” As the birthplace of a number of Holland’s celebrated painters, including Franz Hals and Jacob van Ruysdael, Haarlem holds as her most cherished possession a handsome percentage of the works of the former, numbering among which are his ten famous corporation and regent canvases, arranged in chronological order in the museum of the old Town Hall. To know these will mean that you know the jovial Franz. Across the market place from the Town Hall rises the Groote Kerk, and, just beside it, the old meat market, erected in 1602, and said, by those who know, to be the quaintest brick and stone Renaissance building in the Netherlands. The Groote Kerk is of a graceful cruciform shape and around the edges of its buttresses, like chicks peeping from under the protecting wings of the mother hen, are built a number of curious little one-story houses whose interiors suggest the last word in coziness and cleanliness, and where the much maligned Dutch decorative taste may be seen at its best. The church contains what was long considered the largest and loudest pipe organ in the world, possessing three keyboards, sixty stops, and 5,000 pipes of varying lengths and diameters up to thirty-two feet in the case of the former and fifteen inches with respect to the latter. A cannon ball, imbedded in the wall of the south aisle of the church, was allowed to remain undisturbed during the restoration as a reminiscence of the siege of 1572.