and ally itself with them."

"Do you call their treatment mild?" asked the Counsellor.

"I do not speak," continued the son, "of the executions, the
ill-treatment and all these cruelties against individuals, they are
severe enough; that even women and children are not spared is enough to
inspire all mankind with horror. I mean the dreadful manner in which
the war is carried on, so that already a royal army has been destroyed
without being able to arrive at the root of the evil itself. Their
warfare consists in skirmishes, in the mountains where the strange
soldier is almost always more easily entrapped; the rebels are
succoured by the mountaineers, who provide them with troops and
provisions, by the war these rude men learn to make war, and although
they cannot succeed in repeating these attacks in full force, and from
all points, at the same time, with military skill and discipline, yet
it is evident that the evil will rage still longer and perhaps they may
finally conquer."

"You appear to have changed your mind about your Marshal," said the
Lord of Beauvais.

"My Marshal?" resumed the son, "he is the King's-marshal, and under
this title he serves as a representative of his majesty to us all,
although the better part of the people desire that it should not be
so."

"Would to heaven," said the doctor, "that he only belonged to one of
us; I at least would make a vigourous attack upon him with pills and
rhubarb, so that he would soon make room for us; he is the only man
against whom I have ever before felt a grudge. Has he not in the space
of eight months sentenced to death more men than all the doctors in the
province would have been able to do. All those yonder in the mountains,
Cavalier and Roland included, he considers merely as his future
patients, and like an ignorant empiric he invariably prescribes one and
the same remedy for the most opposite constitutions. Yesterday, he
again caused twelve prophets to be hanged, who all affirmed, with their
latest breath, that a term would be soon put to his power. What is your
opinion, Ned, about this gift of prophecy, of these ecstasies and
convulsions?"

"It will not be believed in foreign lands," said the latter, "that such
things are practised, that many reasonable men speak of them as of a
mystery, and that our calender dates 1703."

"Let it date!" said Vila, "it seems then, my child, that you understand
the affair, inform me a little on the subject, for I do not