HILDREN OF BELIAL.

The elderly Huguenot had stood silent after his repulse by the king,
with his eyes cast moodily downwards, and a face in which doubt, sorrow,
and anger contended for the mastery. He was a very large, gaunt man,
raw-boned and haggard, with a wide forehead, a large, fleshy nose, and a
powerful chin. He wore neither wig nor powder, but Nature had put her
own silvering upon his thick grizzled locks, and the thousand puckers
which clustered round the edges of his eyes, or drew at the corners of
his mouth, gave a set gravity to his face which needed no device of the
barber to increase it. Yet in spite of his mature years, the swift
anger with which he had sprung up when the king refused his plaint, and
the keen fiery glance which he had shot at the royal court as they filed
past him with many a scornful smile and whispered gibe at his expense,
all showed that he had still preserved something of the strength and of
the spirit of his youth. He was dressed as became his rank, plainly and
yet well, in a sad-coloured brown kersey coat with silver-plated
buttons, knee-breeches of the same, and white woollen stockings, ending
in broad-toed black leather shoes cut across with a great steel buckle.
In one hand he carried his low felt hat, trimmed with gold edging, and
in the other a little cylinder of paper containing a recital of his
wrongs, which he had hoped to leave in the hands of the king's
secretary.

His doubts as to what his next step should be were soon resolved for him
in a very summary fashion. These were days when, if the Huguenot was
not absolutely forbidden in France, he was at least looked upon as a
man who existed upon sufferance, and who was unshielded by the laws
which protected his Catholic fellow-subjects. For twenty years the
stringency of the persecution had increased until there was no weapon
which bigotry could employ, short of absolute expulsion, which had not
been turned against him. He was impeded in his business, elbowed out of
all public employment, his house filled with troops, his children
encouraged to rebel against him, and all redress refused him for the
insults and assaults to which he was subjected. Every rascal who wished
to gratify his personal spite, or to gain favour with his bigoted
superiors, might do his worst upon him without fear of the law. Yet, in
spite of all, these men clung to the land which disowned them, and, full
of the love for their native soil which