, where he
faced the papal armies, he laid a scheme to take the Pope himself. A
snowstorm kept the fiery Julius in his tent, and Bayard lost him. A few
days afterward the pontiff's life was in his hands. A traitor offered,
for a purse of gold, to poison the Pope's wine. But it is not the
Bayards of the world who fight with pots of poison; and the slippery
Judas had to fly in terror from the camp, or Bayard would infallibly
have hanged him.

So far, amid his life of perils, Bayard had escaped without a wound. But
now his time had come.

Brescia was taken by the troops of Venice. Gaston de Foix, the
thunderbolt of Italy, marched with 12,000 men to its relief. Bayard was
among them. At the head of the storming-party he was first across the
ramparts, and was turning round to cheer his men to victory when a pike
struck him in the thigh. The shaft broke off, and the iron head remained
embedded in the wound.

Two of his archers caught him as he fell, bore him out of the rush of
battle, and partly stanched the wound by stripping up the linen of their
shirts. They then bore him to a mansion close at hand. The master of the
house, who seems to have been a person of more wealth than valor, had
disappeared, and was thought to be hiding somewhere in a convent,
leaving his wife and his two daughters to themselves. The girls had fled
into a hay-loft, and plunged themselves beneath the hay; but, on the
thunderous knocking of the archers, the lady of the house came trembling
to the door. Bayard was carried in, a surgeon was luckily discovered
close at hand, and the pike-head was extracted. The wound was pronounced
to be not dangerous. But Bayard, to his great vexation, found he was
doomed to lie in idleness for several weeks.

According to the laws of war, the house was his, and all the inmates
were his prisoners. And the fact was well for them. Outside the house
existed such a scene of horror as, even in that age, was rare. Ten
thousand men lay dead in the great square; the city was given up to
pillage, and it is said that the conquerors gorged themselves that day
with booty worth three million crowns. The troops were drunk with
victory and rapine. No man's life, no woman's honor, was in safety for
an instant.

Bayard set his archers at the door-way. His name was a talisman against
the boldest; and in the midst of the fierce tumult that raged all round
it, the house in which he lay remained a sanctuary of peace.

The ladies of