the same. Some of the women, however, went on
knitting hard, as they gabbled prayers and looked at the fast-blackening
sun. Knitting was to Jersey women, like breathing or tale-bearing,
life itself. With their eyes closing upon earth they would have gone on
knitting and dropped no stitches.

A dusk came down like that over Pompeii and Herculaneum. The tragedy of
fear went hand in hand with burlesque commonplace. The grey stone walls
of the houses grew darker and darker, and seemed to close in on the
dumfounded, hysterical crowd. Here some one was shouting command to
imaginary militia; there an aged crone was offering, without price,
simnels and black butter, as a sort of propitiation for an imperfect
past; and from a window a notorious evil-liver was frenziedly crying
that she had heard the devil and his Rocbert witches revelling in the
prison dungeons the night before. Thereupon a long-haired fanatic,
once a barber, with a gift for mad preaching, sprang upon the Pompe des
Brigands, and declaring that the Last Day was come, shrieked:

"The Spirit of the Lord is upon me! He hath sent me to proclaim
liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that
are bound!"

Some one thrust into his hand a torch. He waved it to and fro in his
wild harangue; he threw up his arms towards the ominous gloom, and with
blatant fury ordered open the prison doors. Other torches and candles
appeared, and the mob trembled to and fro in delirium.

"The prison! Open the Vier Prison! Break down the doors!
Gatd'en'ale--drive out the devils! Free the prisoners--the poor
vauriens!" the crowd shouted, rushing forward with sticks and weapons.

The prison arched the street as Temple Bar once spanned the Strand. They
crowded under the archway, overpowered the terror-stricken jailer, and,
battering open the door in frenzy, called the inmates forth.

They looked to see issue some sailor seized for whistling of a Sabbath,
some profane peasant who had presumed to wear pattens in church, some
profaner peasant who had not doffed his hat to the Connetable, or some
slip-shod militiaman who had gone to parade in his sabots, thereby
offending the red-robed dignity of the Royal Court.

Instead, there appeared a little Frenchman of the most refined and
unusual appearance. The blue cloth of his coat set off the extreme
paleness of a small but serene face and high round forehead. The hair, a
beautiful silver grey which time only had po