ry winter the awful carnage
continued, with success so equally balanced that there was no prospect
of any termination to this most awful of national calamities. Early in
March, 1590, the armies of Henry IV. and of the Duke of Mayenne began
to congregate in the vicinity of Ivry, about fifty miles west of
Paris, for a decisive battle. The snows of winter had nearly
disappeared, and the cold rains of spring deluged the roads. The
Sabbath of the eleventh of March was wet and tempestuous. As night
darkened over the bleak and soaked plains of Ivry, innumerable
battalions of armed men, with spears, and banners, and heavy pieces of
artillery, dragged axle-deep through the mire, were dimly discerned
taking positions for an approaching battle. As the blackness of
midnight enveloped them, the storm increased to fearful fury. The gale
fiercely swept the plain, in its loud wailings and its roar drowning
every human sound. The rain, all the night long, poured down in
torrents. But through the darkness and the storm, and breasting the
gale, the contending hosts, without even a watch-fire to cheer the
gloom, waited anxiously for the morning.

In the blackest hour of the night, a phenomenon, quite unusual at that
season of the year, presented itself. The lightning gleamed in
dazzling brilliance from cloud to cloud, and the thunder rolled over
their heads as if an aerial army were meeting and charging in the
sanguinary fight. It was an age of superstition, and the shivering
soldiers thought that they could distinctly discern the banners of the
battling hosts. Eagerly and with awe they watched the surgings of the
strife as spirit squadrons swept to and fro with streaming banners of
fire, and hurling upon each other the thunderbolts of the skies. At
length the storm of battle seemed to lull, or, rather, to pass away in
the distance. There was the retreat of the vanquished, the pursuit of
the victors. The flash of the guns became more faint, and the roar of
the artillery diminished as farther and still farther the embattled
hosts vanished among the clouds. Again there was the silence of
midnight, and no sounds were heard but the plashing of the rain.

The Royalists and the insurgents, each party inflamed more or less by
religious fanaticism, were each disposed to regard the ethereal battle
as waged between the spirits of light and the spirits of darkness,
angels against fiends. Each party, of course, imagined itself as
represented by the