to pay for every Cagot
remaining in Spain at the expiration of that time. The inhabitants of
the villages rose up and flogged out any of the miserable race who might
be in their neighbourhood; but the French were on their guard against
this enforced irruption, and refused to permit them to enter France.
Numbers were hunted up into the inhospitable Pyrenees, and there died of
starvation, or became a prey to wild beasts. They were obliged to wear
both gloves and shoes when they were thus put to flight, otherwise the
stones and herbage they trod upon and the balustrades of the bridges that
they handled in crossing, would, according to popular belief, have become
poisonous.

And all this time, there was nothing remarkable or disgusting in the
outward appearance of this unfortunate people. There was nothing about
them to countenance the idea of their being lepers--the most natural mode
of accounting for the abhorrence in which they were held. They were
repeatedly examined by learned doctors, whose experiments, although
singular and rude, appear to have been made in a spirit of humanity. For
instance, the surgeons of the king of Navarre, in sixteen hundred, bled
twenty-two Cagots, in order to examine and analyze their blood. They
were young and healthy people of both sexes; and the doctors seem to have
expected that they should have been able to extract some new kind of salt
from their blood which might account for the wonderful heat of their
bodies. But their blood was just like that of other people. Some of
these medical men have left us a description of the general appearance of
this unfortunate race, at a time when they were more numerous and less
intermixed than they are now. The families existing in the south and
west of France, who are reputed to be of Cagot descent at this day, are,
like their ancestors, tall, largely made, and powerful in frame; fair and
ruddy in complexion, with gray-blue eyes, in which some observers see a
pensive heaviness of look. Their lips are thick, but well-formed. Some
of the reports name their sad expression of countenance with surprise and
suspicion--"They are not gay, like other folk." The wonder would be if
they were. Dr. Guyon, the medical man of the last century who has left
the clearest report on the health of the Cagots, speaks of the vigorous
old age they attain to. In one family alone, he found a man of seventy-
four years of age; a woman as old, gathering cherries; an