a Noue urged.

The King shook his head, and smiling, clapped the veteran on the
shoulder. "Not so," he said. "The man is no traitor: I say it. And you
have never met with a longer head than Henry's."

"Never," assented La Noue bluntly, "save when there is a woman in it!"

* * * * *

The curtain falls. The men have lived and are dead. La Noue, the
Huguenot Bayard, now exists only in a dusty memoir and a page of Motley.
Madame de Montpensier is forgotten; all of her, save her golden
scissors. Mayenne, D'Aumale, a verse preserves their names. Only
Henry--the "good King," as generations of French peasants called
him--remains a living figure: his strength and weakness, his sins and
virtues, as well known, as thoroughly appreciated by thousands now as in
the days of his life.

It follows that we cannot hope to learn much of the fortunes of people
so insignificant--save for that moment when the fate of a nation hung on
their breath--as the Portails and Toussaints. We do know that Felix
proved worthy. For though the attack on Paris which was planned at
Toussaint's house, failed, it did not fail through treachery. And we
know that Felix married Madeline, and that Adrian won Marie: but no
more. Unless certain Portails now living in various parts of the world,
whose ancestors left France at the time of the Revocation of the Edict
of Nantes, are their descendants. And certainly it is curious that in
these families it is not rare to find the eldest son bearing the name of
Henry, and the second of Felix.

THE KING'S STRATAGEM

In the days when Henry the Fourth of France was as yet King of Navarre
only, and in that little kingdom of hills and woods which occupies the
south-western corner of the larger country, was with difficulty
supporting the Huguenot cause against the French court and the Catholic
League--in the days when every little moated town, from the Dordogne to
the Pyrenees, was a bone of contention between the young king and the
crafty queen-mother, Catherine de Medicis, a conference between these
warring personages took place in the picturesque town of La Reole. And
great was the fame of it.

La Reole still rises grey, time-worn, and half-ruined on a lofty cliff
above the broad green waters of the Garonne, forty odd miles from
Bordeaux. It is a small place now, but in the days of which we are
speaking it was important, strongly fortified, and guarded by a castle
which looked