they?" asked the ringleader, pushing his companions
away.

"Hidden in the church, hidden in the church."

"We knew that, you traitorous dog. Now then for the soul-saving. Catch
hold there and run away with it. A horse should be ridden, father--your
own saying--and an angel must learn to fly."

Thus ended the life of the Abbe Dominic at the hands of avenging men.
Without a doubt they were fierce and bloody-minded, for the reader must
not suppose that all the wickedness of those days lies on the heads of
the Inquisition and the Spaniards. The adherents of the New Religion did
evil things also, things that sound dreadful in our ears. In excuse
of them, however, this can be urged, that, compared to those of their
oppressors, they were as single trees to a forest full; also that they
who worked them had been maddened by their sufferings. If our fathers,
husbands and brothers had been burned at the stake, or done to death
under the name of Jesus in the dens of the Inquisition, or slaughtered
by thousands in the sack of towns; if our wives and daughters had been
shamed, if our houses had been burned, our goods taken, our liberties
trampled upon, and our homes made a desolation, then, my reader, is it
not possible that even in these different days you and I might have been
cruel when our hour came? God knows alone, and God be thanked that so
far as we can foresee, except under the pressure, perhaps, of invasion
by semi-barbarian hordes, or of dreadful and sudden social revolutions,
civilized human nature will never be put to such a test again.

Far aloft in the gloom there, swinging from the arm of the Cross, whose
teachings his life had mocked, like some mutinous sailor at the yard of
the vessel he had striven to betray, the priest hung dead, but his life
did not appease the fury of the triumphant mob.

"The others," they cried, "find the others," and with torches and
lanterns they hunted round the great church. They ascended the belfry,
they rummaged the chapels, they explored the crypt; then, baffled, drew
together in a countless crowd in the nave, shouting, gesticulating,
suggesting.

"Get dogs," cried a voice; "dogs will smell them out;" and dogs
were brought, which yapped and ran to and fro, but, confused by the
multitude, and not knowing what to seek, found nothing. Then some one
threw an image from a niche, and next minute, with a cry of "Down with
the idols," the work of destruction began.

Fanatics sprang at