ey
could descend into the street.

One family, which had locked itself into the cellar of a rambling
cottage, cried through the grating, where the father stood madly
brandishing a pitchfork. An old, bald-headed man was sobbing all alone
on a dung-heap; a woman in yellow had fainted in the market-place and
her husband was holding her under her arms and moaning in the shadow
of a pear-tree; another, in red, was kissing her little girl, who had
lost her hands, and lifting first one arm and then the other to see if
she would not move. Yet another ran into the country and the soldiers
pursued her through the hayricks that bounded the snow-clad fields.

Beneath the inn of the Four Sons of Aymon there was a tumult as of a
siege. The inhabitants had barred the door; and the soldiers went
round and round the house without being able to make their way in.
They were trying to clamber up to the sign by the fruit-trees against
the front wall, when they caught sight of a ladder behind the
garden-door. They set it against the wall and mounted one after the
other. Thereupon the landlord and all his household hurled tables,
chairs, dishes and cradles at them from the windows. The ladder upset
and the soldiers fell down.

In a wooden hut, at the end of the village, another band found a
peasant-woman bathing her children in a tub by the fire. Being old and
almost deaf, she did not hear them come in. Two soldiers took the tub
and carried it off; and the dazed woman went after them, with the
children's clothes, wanting to dress them. But, when she came to the
door and suddenly saw the splashes of blood in the village, the swords
in the orchard, the cradles over-turned in the street, women on their
knees and women waving their arms around the dead, she began to cry
out with all her strength and to strike the soldiers, who put down the
tub to defend themselves. The priest also came hastening up and,
folding his hands across his vestment, entreated the Spaniards before
the naked children, who were whimpering in the water. Other soldiers
then came up and pushed him aside and bound the raving peasant-woman
to a tree.

The butcher had hidden his little daughter and, leaning against his
house, looked on in unconcern. A foot-soldier and one of the men in
armour went in and discovered the child in a copper cauldron. Then the
butcher, in desperation, took one of his knives and chased them down
the street; but a band that was passing struck the k