The women, too, enrolled themselves into companies, chose their officers--or "mine-mistresses," as they were called--and did good service daily in the caverns of the earth.
Thus a whole army of gnomes were noiselessly at work to destroy and defend the beleaguered city.

The mine advanced towards the gate; the besieged delved deeper, and intersected it with a transverse excavation, and the contending forces met daily, in deadly encounter, within these sepulchral gangways.

Many stratagems were, mutually employed.

The citizens secretly constructed a dam across the Spanish mine, and then deluged their foe with hogsheads of boiling water.

Hundreds were thus scalded to death.