Page:History of England (Froude) Vol 7.djvu/594

 574 REIGN OF ELIZABETH. [CH. 46 ferent whether its victims returned in triumph from a stricken field, or were cooped within their walls by hordes of savage enemies. By the middle of March there were left out of eleven hundred men but three hundred available to fight. Reinforcements had been raised at Liverpool, but they were countermanded when on the point of sailing : it was thought idle to send them to inevitable death. The English council was discuss- ing the propriety of removing the colony to the Bann, when accident finished the work which the plague had begun, and spared them the trouble of deliberation. The huts and sheds round the monastery had been huddled together for the convenience of fortification. At the end of April, probably after a drying east wind, a fire broke out in a blacksmith's forge, which spread irre- sistibly through the entire range of buildings. The flames at last reached the powder magazine ; thirty men were blown in pieces by the explosion ; and the rest, paralyzed by this last addition to their misfortunes, made no more effort to extinguish the conflagration. St Loo, with all that remained of that ill-fated party, watched from their provision boats in the river the utter destruction of the settlement which had begun so happily, and then sailed drearily away to find a refuge in Knockfergus. Such was the fate of the first effort for the building of Londonderry ; and below its later glories, as so often happens in this world, lay the bones of many a hundred gallant men who lost their lives in laying its founda- tions. Elizabeth, who in the immediate pressure of calamity resumed at once her nobler nature, ' perceiv-