r of the enemy.

The audience was large and sympathizing. Montauban had become the refuge
of many Huguenot families who could nowhere else profess their faith
without constant danger; and a large proportion of these were ladies,
wives of gentlemen in the army kept up by La Noue, or widows who feared
that their children might be taken from them to be brought up by their
Catholic relations, elderly dames who longed for tranquillity after
having lost husbands or sons by civil war. Thickly they lodged in
the strangely named _gasches_ and _vertiers_, as the divisions and
subdivisions of the city were termed, occupying floors or apartments
of the tall old houses; walking abroad in the streets in grave attire,
stiff hat, crimped ruff, and huge fan, and forming a society in
themselves, close-packed, punctilious and dignified, rigidly devout
but strictly censorious, and altogether as unlike their typical country
folks of Paris as if they had belonged to a different nation. And the
sourest and most severe of all were such as had lived farthest south,
and personally suffered the least peril and alarm.

Dancing was unheard-of enormity; cards and dice were prohibited; and
stronger expletive than the elegant ones invented for the special use
of the King of Navarre was expiated either by the purse or the skin;
Marot's psalmody was the only music, black or sad colour the only
wear; and, a few years later, the wife of one of the most distinguished
statesmen and councilors of Henri of Navarre was excommunicated for the
enormity of wearing her hair curled.

To such a community it was a delightful festival to receive a national
assembly of ministers ready to regale them on daily sermons for a whole
month, and to retail in private the points of discipline debated in
the public assembly; and, apart from mere eagerness for novelty, many a
discreet heart beat with gladness at the meeting with the hunted pastor
of her native home, who had been the first to strike the spiritual
chord, and awake her mind to religion.

Every family had their honoured guest, every reception-room was in turn
the scene of some pious little assembly that drank _eau sucree_, and
rejoiced in its favourite pastor; and each little congress indulged in
gentle scandal against its rival coterie. But there was one point on
which all the ladies agreed,--namely, that good Maitre Isaac Gardon had
fallen into an almost doting state of blindness to the vanities of his
daughter