nces than there had been for years. We have seen that
Champagny's remedy for the ills the country was enduring was "more
Jesuits." And this, too, was Albert's recipe. Always "more Jesuits." And
now the time had come when the Jesuits thought that they might step
openly with their works into the daylight again. Of late years they had
shrouded themselves in comparative mystery, but from their seminaries and
colleges had gone forth a plentiful company of assassins against
Elizabeth and Henry, Nassau, Barneveld, and others who, whether avowedly
or involuntarily, were prominent in the party of human progress. Some
important murders had already been accomplished, and the prospect was
fair that still others might follow, if the Jesuits persevered. Meantime
those ecclesiastics thought that a wholesome example might be by the
spectacle of a public execution.

Two maiden ladies lived on the north rampart of Antwerp. They had
formerly professed the Protestant religion, and had been thrown into
prison for that crime; but the fear of further persecution, human
weakness, or perhaps sincere conviction, had caused them to renounce the
error of their ways, and they now went to mass. But they had a
maidservant, forty years of age, Anna van den Hove by name, who was
staunch in that reformed faith in which she had been born and bred. The
Jesuits denounced this maid-servant to the civil authority, and claimed
her condemnation and execution under the edicts of 1540, decrees which
every one had supposed as obsolete as the statutes of Draco, which they
had so entirely put to shame.

The sentence having been obtained from the docile and priest-ridden
magistrates, Anna van den Hove was brought to Brussels and informed that
she was at once to be buried alive. At the same time, the Jesuits told
her that by converting herself to the Church she might escape punishment.

When King Henry IV. was summoned to renounce that same Huguenot faith, of
which he was the political embodiment and the military champion, the
candid man answered by the simple demand to be instructed. When the
proper moment came, the instruction was accomplished by an archbishop
with the rapidity of magic. Half an hour undid the work of half a
life-time. Thus expeditiously could religious conversion be effected when
an earthly crown was its guerdon. The poor serving-maid was less open to
conviction. In her simple fanaticism she too talked of a crown, and saw
it descending from Heav