rgulous. Yet if this was the mind of the better folk,
there was no lack of base and venomous creatures--flatterers,
time-servers, and sycophants--to minister to his wickedness and
malignity.

Dark were the days which now fell on Sarras, and few were those on
which some violence or injustice, some deed of lust or rapacity was not
flaunted in the face of heaven. The most noble and best men of the
city were attainted and plundered and driven into exile. Of the meaner
sort of folk many a poor citizen or rustic toiler went shaven and
branded, or maimed of nose and eyelids, or with black stumps seared
with pitch and an iron hook for hand. Once more the torture-chamber of
the castle rang with the screams of poor wretches stretched on the
rack; and the ancient instruments of pain, which had rusted through
many a long year of clemency, were once more reddened with the sweat of
human agony.

An insatiable lust of cruelty drove the King to a sort of madness.
With a fiendish malice he fashioned of wood and iron an engine of
torment which bore the likeness of a beautiful woman, but which opened
when a spring was pressed, and showed within a hideous array of knives;
and these pierced the miserable wight about whom the Image closed her
arms. In blasphemous merriment the King called this woman of his
making Our Lady of Sorrow, and in mockery of holy things he kept a
silver lamp burning constantly before her, and crowned her with flowers.

Now in the hour in which the King was left wholly to his wickedness, he
doomed to the Image the young wife of one of the chief men of Sarras.
Little more than a girl was she in years; sweet and exceeding lovely;
and she still suckled her first babe.

When the tormentors would have haled her to the Image, "Forbear," she
said, "there is no need; willingly I go and cheerfully." And with a
fearless meekness she walked before them with her little babe in her
arms into the chamber of agony.

Coming before the Image with its garland of flowers she knelt down, and
prayed to the Virgin Mother of our Lord, and commended her soul and the
soul of her dear babe to our Lady and her divine Son; and the babe
stretched out its little hands to the Image, cooing and babbling in its
innocence.

Then, as though this were a spectacle to make the very stones shriek
and to move the timber of the rack and the iron of the axe to human
tenderness, the Image stepped down from its pedestal, and lifted up
mother and