or the past two
or three years and, as you say, the cellars are as full as they can
hold.

"Tomorrow, Leigh, we will ride over and call upon some of our
neighbours to hear the last news, for the Bocage is as far away
from Nantes as if it were on the other side of France, and we hear
only vague rumours of what is going on here."

The ride was a delightful one to Leigh. He had only once visited
the chateau before, and then only for a day or two. The wild
country, with its deep lanes, its thick high hedges, its woods and
copses, was all new to him; for the country round his English home
was, for the most part, bare and open. Some of the peasants carried
guns over their shoulders, and looked as if accustomed to use them.

"Very few of them possess guns," Jean Martin remarked, "and that
they should carry them shows how disturbed a state of mind all
these people are in. They know that their priests may be arrested
and carried off, at any moment; and no doubt the report that an
order has been issued to raise thirty thousand men throughout
France, and that every town and village has to furnish its quota,
has stirred them up even more effectually. I don't suppose that
many of them think that the authorities will really try to drag men
off, against their will; but the possibility is quite enough to
inflame their minds."

At the very first house they visited they received, from the owner,
ample confirmation of Jean's views.

"There have been continual fracases between the peasants and the
military," he said, "over the attempts of the latter to arrest the
priests. They can scarcely be called fights, for it has not come to
that; but as soon as the peasants hear that the gendarmes are
coming, they send the priest into the wood, and gather in such
force that the gendarmes are glad enough to ride away, unharmed. Of
course, until we see that the peasants are really in earnest, and
intend to fight to the last, it would be madness for any of us to
take any part in the matter; for we should be risking not only life
but the fortunes of our families, and maybe their lives, too. You
must remember, moreover, that already a great number of the landed
proprietors have either been murdered or imprisoned in Paris, or
are fugitives beyond the frontier."

"If the peasants would fight," Jean Martin said, "it might not be a
bad thing that there are so few whom they could regard as their
natural leaders. If there are only a few leaders they ma