utes before.

CHAPTER II.

THE HOUSE ON THE RAMPARTS.

The affair at the inn which had threatened to turn out so unpleasantly
for our hero, should have gone some way towards destroying the illusions
with which he had entered Geneva. But faith is strong in the young, and
hope stronger. The traditions of his boyhood and his fireside, and the
stories, animate with affection for the cradle of the faith, to which he
had listened at his father's knee, were not to be over-ridden by the
shadow of an injustice, which in the end had not fallen. When the young
man went abroad next morning and viewed the tall towers of St. Peter, of
which his father had spoken--when, from those walls which had defied
through so many months the daily and nightly threats of an ever-present
enemy, he looked on the sites of conflicts still famous and on
farmsteads but half risen from their ruins--when, above all, he
remembered for what those walls stood, and that here, on the borders of
the blue lake, and within sight of the glittering peaks which charmed
his eyes--if in any one place in Europe--the battle of knowledge and
freedom had been fought, and the rule of the monk and the Inquisitor
cast down, his old enthusiasm revived. He thirsted for fresh conflicts,
for new occasions: and it is to be feared dreamt more of the Sword than
of the sacred Book, which he had come to study, and which, in Geneva,
went hand in hand with it.

In the fervour of such thoughts and in the multitude of new interests
which opened before him, he had well-nigh forgotten the Syndic's tyranny
before he had walked a mile: nor might he have given a second thought to
it but for the need which lay upon him of finding a new lodging before
night. In pursuit of this he presently took his way to the Corraterie, a
row of gabled houses, at the western end of the High Town, built within
the ramparts, and enjoying over them a view of the open country, and the
Jura. The houses ran for some distance parallel with the rampart, then
retired inwards, and again came down to it; in this way enclosing a
triangular open space or terrace. They formed of themselves an inner
line of defence, pierced at the point farthest from the rampart by the
Porte Tertasse: a gate it is true, which was often open even at night,
for the wall in front of the Corraterie, though low on the town side,
looked down from a great height on the ditch and the low meadows that
fringed the Rhone. Trees planted alon