oned on.
Cantegrel was of course arrested,
examined, and prosecuted; but on other evi-
dence. The parliament of Languedoc took up
the case, and decreed the imprisonment of the
three brothers Siadoux and of M. Chambord,
the curé of Croix-Daurade.

ing death of the wheel. When his knell was rung out from the judgment-seat, the crowds that filled every corner of the court shuddered; none cried "God bless him! "

extorted from a priest the secret of confession, and when Chambord was sentenced to be burned alive, but not before his limbs had been severally broken, a cry of horror and lamentation burst forth, and it was some time before the judges could suppress the indignant expostulations of those present. Several women, among them the daughter of the jailer, fainted; and even that officer himself betrayed visible emotion.

But when the three sons of the murdered man were condemned to the degrading punThe trial that followed was long remem-ishment of the gallows, thereon to be hanged bered for the solemnity and terrible interest by the neck until they were dead, for having which it excited. Priests and laymen were equally moved. Great principles were at stake. The laws of France, and those stronger laws written in the human heart, were at issue. There stood the murderer. There stood the priest who had denounced the murderer, but who had betrayed the trust reposed in him when he entered into the service of the church, and, like a craven soldier, had yielded tp threats. That was the view, at least, which the Romish religion and the law took of an act for which it might have been thought society should have been grateful. there stood the orphans on trial for their lives, because they had determined that no technicalities should stand between them and the punishment of the wretch who had dipped his hands in their father's blood. They stood arraigned for having extorted from a priest the secret of confession.

The unhappy prisoners heard their doom with less apparent excitement then the byLastly, standers. Cantegrel, standing erect, preserved a dogged silence, and confronted his judges with a fixed and determined gaze. The three orphans seemed stunned by the result. The priest, raising his eyes to heaven, said "I appeal to the God of nature and justice against this cruel judgment!

Cantegrel was the object of universal detestation. But it was impossible for any of the audience in whose bosoms bigotry had not extinguished every humane feeling, not to sympathize with the good but weak curé and the bereaved sons. For the murderer, counsel were in attendance, with much the same motive that calls in the aid of physicians in hopeless cases, to watch events, and take advantage of any unexpected turn that might afford a hope of saving the patient. But the advocates for the curé and the young Siadouxs exerted all their eloquence powerfully and bravely; and though they had to wrestle against the gigantic force of the law, they made so gallant and so affecting a defence that they carried all hearts with them, and as they ceased, the audience, with moist eyes, gave vent to acclamations, and under the excitement of the moment anticipated an acquittal.

But the public prosecutor soon dissipated these gleams of hope. He stood there for law, and all the prisoners were pronounced to be guilty.

Cantegrel was led out to suffer amid the execrations of the swarming crowd that sur rounded the scaffold. He spoke but once: when the officiating clergyman approached him with the cross and words of comfort, he waved him back as well as his manacled arms would permit, saying, "I have had enough of priests." At the first blow he uttered one piercing cry; but the repeated descent of the crushing iron bar on his limbs, at cruelly calculated intervals, failed to wring forth another; nor did he give vent to a moan during the long hours which slowly followed each other, till his soul flitted from his mangled body to its account.

The fate of Chambord, who was much and justly beloved, excited the greatest commiseration. Every effort was made to obtain a remission of his terrible sentence, and there was evidently a disposition in the highest quarter to pardon him. But the sanguinary church was inexorable; its power over enslaved souls was gone if the secrets of the confessional were told. We have seen that church publicly dare to defy the law of England, and it was not likely to suffer itself to be deprived of its prey when the law of France All the mercy which the

Then came the cruel sentence.
Cantegrel was condemned to the excruciat- was in its favor.

But Mr. Hobbs is not the only personage who laughs at locksmiths.

most earnest entreaties and most pressing | tried in vain: the jailer and his aids were solicitations could obtain for the unfortunate incorruptible. curé was, that the executioner should be permitted to give him the coup de grace as he was bound to the cross of St. Andrew, before his body was committed to the flames.

The populace, priest-ridden as it was, and keen as was its appetite for the horrible, did not witness this legal butchery without murmurs but the youth, the beauty, the filial piety of the three brothers inspired the good citizens of Toulouse with such an intense interest, that the authorities dreaded a rising in their favor on the day of execution, and not without reason, for they felt that, upon this occasion, the vox populi would indeed be the vox Dei.

Over the mountains,
And over the waves;
Under the fountains,
And under the graves;
Over floods that are deepest,
Which Neptune obey;
Over rocks that are steepest,
Love will find out the way.

The jailer's fair daughter had cast the eyes of affection on Jean, and, sooth to say, Annette's youth and beauty were worthy of him. The difficulties of communication vanished before the inventive faculties and inexhaustible resources of a woman in love, and after innumerable disappointments, the whole city trembled with delight at learning that the very day before that fixed for the execution, the three brothers, accompanied by Annette, who had managed to effect their liberation, had left the gloomy precincts of the Hauts Murats, and had gained a place of refuge, where they were in safety, before pursuit was thought of. Indeed, their cause was considered so entirely the cause of the whole province, that no great eagerness would have been manifested to overtake them if they had still been within reach of the arm of the law, so the authorities comforted themselves with causing the sentence to be executed in effigy, while the priests gnashed their teeth at the loss of their victims: at both which exhibitions the good people of Toulouse made themselves merry.

The prison of the Hauts Murats, in which the brothers were confined, was of extraordinary strength, and many an anxious look was directed towards its massive walls by friendly eyes, whose owners had internally sworn that these bereaved youths should not be murdered by form of law. All hope, however, of getting them out before the fatal day, was gone, and a plan was organized for rescuing them from the scaffold at all hazards, when the peace of the town was preserved, and the law was prevented from committing a great crime, by the escape of the prisoners, through the aid of friendly hands within the prison. Jean, the youngest of the brethren, whose force of character had first opened up to his elders the way for getting at the secret of their father's murder, he who had been the first to conceive and the most ready to execute the daring duress on the unhappy priest, was as handsome and well-made a specimen of vigorous humanity as any in the province of Languedoc. Many a fair dame had lost her heart as she gazed on the fine features and well-proportioned form of the young man as he stood distinguished from his fellow-prisoners by his beauty, stature, and noble mien, before they took their seats on the bench of the accused; and many a bright eye might have restrained its tears if Jean had not been among the condemned. Force being of no avail against the impregnable stone-work of the Hauts Murats, those golden keys which have opened so many locks were tried and police of Paris.

The Regent afterwards permitted the fugitives to re-enter France; but they could not reäppear either at Toulouse or at Croix-Daurade; nor indeed at any place to which the parliament of Languedoc resorted. They came to reside at Paris; but their priestly enemies would not let them rest even there, and the memorial which they addressed to the Marquis d'Argenson, praying his protection, and that they might be left undisturbed by the persecution which still followed them, notwithstanding their lettres de grace, may, it is said, still be seen in the archives of the

From Household Words.
HALF A LIFE-TIME AGO.

CHAPTER I.

HALF a life-time ago there lived a single woman, of the name of Susan Dixon, in one of the Westmoreland dales. She was the owner of the small farm-house where she resided, and of some thirty or forty acres of land by which it was surrounded. She had also an hereditary right to a sheep-walk, extending to the wild fells that overhang Blea Tarn. In the language of the country, she was a Stateswoman. Her house is yet to be seen on the Oxenfell road, between Skelwith and Coniston. You go along a moorland track, made by the carts that occasionally come for turf from the Oxenfell. A brook babbles and brattles by the wayside, giving you a sense of companionship which relieves the deep solitude in which this way is usually traversed. Some miles on this side of Coniston there is a farmstead, a gray stone house and a square of farm-buildings surrounding a green space of rough turf, in the midst of which stands a mighty, funereal, umbrageous yew, making a solemn shadow, as of death, in the very heart and centre of the light and heat of the brightest summer day. On the side away from the house, this yard slopes down to a dark-brown pool, which is supplied with fresh water from the overflowings of a stone cistern, into which some rivulet of the brook before mentioned continually, and melodiously falls and bubbles. The cattle drink out of this cistern. The household bring their pitchers, and fill them with drinking water by a dilatory, yet pretty, process. The water-carrier brings with her a leaf of the hound's-tongue fern, and inserting it in the crevice of the gray rock, makes a cool green spout for the sparkling stream.

no liberal sum-no fair words-moved her
from her stony manner, or her monotonous
tone of indifferent refusal. No persuasion
could induce her to show any more of the
house than that first room; no appearance of
fatigue procured for the weary an invitation
to sit down and rest; and if one more bold and
less delicate sate down without being asked,
Susan stood by, cold and apparently deaf, or
only replying by the briefest monosyllables,
till the unwelcome visitor had departed.
Yet those with whom she had dealings in the
way of selling her cattle or her farm produce,
spoke of her as keen after a bargain-
-a hard
one to have to do with; and she never spared
herself exertion or fatigue, at market or in
the field, to make the most of her produce.
She led the haymakers with her swift steady
rake, and her noiseless evenness of motion.
She was about among the earliest in the mar-
ket, examining samples of oats, pricing them,
and then turning with grim satisfaction to
her own cleaner corn.

She was served faithfully and long by those who were rather her fellow-laborers than her servants. She was even and just in her dealings with them. If she was peculiar and silent, they knew her, and knew that she might be relied on. Some of them had known her from her childhood; and deep in their hearts was an unspoken-almost unconsciouspity for her; for they knew her story, though they never spoke of it.

Yes; the time had been when that tall, gaunt, hard-featured, angular woman - who never smiled, and hardly ever spoke an unnecessary word—had been a fine-looking girl, bright-spirited and rosy; and when the hearth at the Yew Nook had been as bright as she, with family love, and youthful hope and mirth. Fifty or fifty-one years ago, William Dixon and his wife Margaret were alive; and The house is no specimen, at the present Susan, their daughter, was about eighteen day, of what it was in the life-time of Susan years old - ten years older than the only Dixon. Then, every small diamond pane in other child, a boy, named after his father. the windows glittered with cleanliness. You William and Margaret Dixon were rather might have eaten off the floor; you could see superior people, of a character belongingyourself in the pewter plates and the polished as far as I have seen-exclusively to the class oaken awmry, or dresser, of the state kitchen of Westmoreland and Cumberland statesmen, into which you entered. Few strangers pen--just, independent, upright; not given to etrated further than this room. Once or much speaking; kind-hearted, but not detwice, wandering tourists, attracted by the monstrative; disliking change, and new ways, lonely picturesqueness of the situation, and the exquisite cleanliness of the house itself, made their way into this house-place, and offered money enough (as they thought) to tempt the hostess to receive them as lodgers. They would give no trouble, they said; they would be out rambling or sketching all day long; would be perfectly content with a share of the food which she provided for herself; or would procure what they required from the Waterhead Inn at Coniston. But

and new people; sensible and shrewd; each household self-contained, and having little curiosity as to their neighbors, with whom they rarely met for any social intercourse, save at the stated times of sheep-shearing and Christmas; having a certain kind of sober pleasure in amassing money, which occasionally made them miserable (as they call miserly people up in the north) in their old age; reading no light or ephemeral literature. but the grave, solid books brought round by the

peddlers (Paradise Lost and Regained, the healthy girl; a clever help to her mother and Death of Abel, the Spiritual Quixote, and a spirited companion to her father; more of the Pilgrim's Progress) were to be found in a man in her (as he often said) than her delinearly every house: the men occasionally cate little brother ever would have. He was going off laking, i. e. playing, i. e. drinking his mother's darling, although she loved for days together, and having to be hunted up Susan well. There was no positive engageby anxious wives, who dared not leave their ment between Michael and Susan-I doubt husbands to the chances of the wild precip- if even plain words of love had been spoken ; itous roads, but walked miles and miles, lan- when one winter-time Margaret Dixon was tern in hand, in the dead of night, to discover seized with inflammation, consequent upon a and guide the solemnly-drunken husband neglected cold. She had always been strong home; who had a dreadful headache, the and notable, and had been too busy to attend next day, and the day after that came forth to the earliest symptoms of illness. It would as grave, and sober, and virtuous-looking as go off, she said to the woman who helped in if there were no such things as malt and the kitchen; or if she did not feel better spirituous liquors in the world; and who when they had got the hams and bacon out were seldom reminded of their misdoings by of hand, she would take some herb-tea and their wives, to whom such occasional out- nurse up a bit. But Death could not wait breaks were as things of course, when once till the hams and bacon were cured; he came the immediate anxiety produced by them was on with rapid strides, and shooting arrows of over. Such were- such arethe character-portentous agony. Susan had never seen illistics of a class now passing away from the ness-never knew how much she loved her face of the land, as their compeers, the yeo- mother till now, when she felt a dreadful inmen, have done before. Of such was William stinctive certainty that she was losing her. Dixon. He was a shrewd, clever farmer, in Her mind was thronged with recollections of his day and generation, when shrewdness was the many times she had slighted her mother's rather shown in the breeding and rearing of wishes; her heart was full of the echoes of sheep and cattle than in the cultivation of careless and angry replies that she had spoken. land. Owing to this character of his, states- What would she not now give to have oppormen from a distance from beyond Kendal, tunities of service and obedience, and trials or from Borrowdale, of greater wealth than of her patience and love for that dear mother he, would send their sons to be farm-servants who lay gasping in torture! And yet Susan for a year or two with him, in order to learn had been a good girl and an affectionate some of his methods before setting up on land daughter. of their own. When Susan, his daughter, was about seventeen, one Michael Hurst was a farm-servant at Yew Nook. He worked with the master and lived with the family, and was in all respects treated as an equal, except in the field. His father was a wealthy statesman at Wythburne, up beyond Grasmere; and through Michael's servitude the families had become acquainted, and the Dixons went over to the High Beck sheep- "Susan, lass, thou must not fret. It is shearing, and the Hursts came down by Red God's will, and thou wilt have a deal to do. Bank, and Loughrig Tarn, and across the Keep father straight if thou canst; and if he Oxenfell, when there was the Christmas-tide goes out Ulverstone ways, see that thou meet feasting at Yew Nook. The fathers strolled him before he gets to the Old Quarry. It's round the fields together, examined cattle and a dree bit for a man who has had a drop. sheep, and looked knowing over each other's As for lile Will"-here the poor woman's horses. The mothers inspected the dairies face began to work and her fingers to move and household arrangements, each openly nervously as they lay on the bed-quilt-"lile admiring the plans of the other, but secretly preferring their own. Both fathers and mothers cast a glance from time to time at Michael and Susan, who were thinking of nothing less than farm or dairy, but whose unspoken attachment was in all ways so suitable and natural a thing, that each parent rejoiced over it, although with characteristic reserve it was never spoken about-not even between husband and wife.

Susan had been a strong, independent,

The sharp pain went off, and delicious ease came on; yet still her mother sunk. In the midst of this languid peace she was dying. She motioned Susan to her bedside, for she could only whisper; and then, while the father was out of the room, she spoke as much to the eager, hungering eyes of her daughter by the motion of her lips, as by the slow, feeble sounds of her voice.

Will will miss me most of all. Father's often vexed with him because he's not a quick, strong lad; he is not, my poor lile chap. And father thinks he's saucy, because he cannot always stomach oat-cake and porridge. There 's better than three pound in th' old black teapot on the top shelf of the cupboard. Just keep a piece of loaf-bread by you, Susan dear, for Will to come to when he 's not taken his breakfast. I have, may be, spoilt him; but there'll be no one to spoil him now."

She began to cry a low, feeble cry, and good penny in the Kendal bank in store for covered up her face that Susan might not see Michael. When harvest was over, he went her. That dear face! those precious moments while yet the eyes could look out with love and intelligence. Susan laid her head down close by her mother's ear.

Susan was as red now as she had been pale before; it was the first time that her influ-sparks. ence over Michael had been openly acknowledged by a third person, and a flash of joy came athwart the solemn sadness of the moment. Her mother had spoken too much, and now came on the miserable faintness. She never spoke again coherently; but when her children and her husband stood by her bedside, she took lile Will's hand and put it into Susan's, and looked at her with imploring eyes. Susan clasped her arms round Will, and leaned her head upon his curly pate, and vowed to herself to be as a mother to him.