or he was outcast, and hungry, and a wanderer whom
men sought to kill.

These were mostly poor people or peasants; but it was so with the rich
and well-to-do in the bloody Middle Ages. The Catholic country gentleman
helping the Protestant refugee to escape disguised as a manservant (or
a maidservant), and the Protestant country gentleman doing likewise by
a hunted Catholic in his turn, as the battles went. Rebel helping
royalist, and royalist helping rebel. And always, here and there, down
through those ages, the delicate girl standing with her back to a door
and her arms outstretched across it, and facing, with flashing eyes, the
soldiers of the king or of the church--or entertaining and bluffing
them with beautiful lies--to give some poor hunted devil time to hide
or escape, though she a daughter of royalists and the church, and he a
rebel to his king and a traitor to his creed. For they sought to kill
him.

There was sanctuary in those times, in the monkeries--and the churches,
where the soldiers of the king dared not go, for fear of God. There
has been sanctuary since, in London and other places, where His or Her
Majesty's police dared not go because of the fear of man. The "Rocks"
was really sanctuary, even in my time--also Woollomooloo. Now the only
sanctuary is the jail.

And, not so far away, my masters! Down close to us in history, and in
Merrie England, during Judge Jeffreys's "Bloody Assize," which followed
on the Monmouth rebellion and formed the blackest page in English
history, "a worthy widow named Elizabeth Gaunt was burned alive at
Tyburn, for having sheltered a wretch who himself gave evidence against
her. She settled the fuel about herself with her own hands, so that the
flames should reach her quickly; and nobly said, with her last breath,
that she had obeyed the sacred command of God, to give refuge to the
outcast and not to betray the wanderer." (Charles Dickens's _History of
England._)

Note, I am not speaking of rebel to rebel, or loyalist to loyalist,
or comrade to comrade, or clansman to clansman in trouble--that goes
without saying--but of man and woman to man and woman in trouble, the
highest form of clannishness, the clannishness that embraces the whole
of this wicked world--the Clan of Mankind!

French people often helped English prisoners of war to escape to the
coast and across the water, and English people did likewise by the
French; and none dared raise the cry of "traitors." It w