e well known to Edred. Most of the prisoners were trembling and
cowering; but he held his head erect, and looked calmly round upon
the assembled potentates. There was no fear or shrinking in his
pinched face. He eyed the prior with a look as unbending as his
own.

Then began a long harangue from the great man, in which the wiles
of the devil in the pestilent doctrines of the heretics, so-called
Lollards, were forcibly and not illogically pointed out. When no
man might give answer, when none might show where misrepresentation
came in, where there was nothing given but the one side of the
question, it was not difficult to make an excellent case against
the accused. The early heretics, mostly unlettered people, always
marred the purity of the cause by falling into exaggeration and
foolishness, by denouncing what was good as well as what was
corrupt in a system against which they were revolting--thus laying
themselves open to attack and confutation, and alienating from them
many who would have striven to stand their friend and to have
gently set them right had they been less headstrong and less prone
to tear away and condemn every practice the meaning of which they
were, through ignorance and want of comprehension, unable to enter
into.

In the hands of the skilful prior their doctrines were indeed made
to look vile and blasphemous and foolish in the extreme. Many
persons shuddered at hearing what words had been used by them with
regard to the holy sacraments; and most of the persons brought to
their trial were weeping and terrified at their own conduct before
the prior's speech was half through. Only the hunchback retained
his bold front, and looked back with scorn into the face of the
prelate as he made point after point in his scathing denunciation.

When the harangue ended, the prior made a sign to his servants, and
immediately one of the most timorous and craven of the prisoners
was brought up before him. He was far too cunning a judge to try
first to bend the spirit of the hunchback. He knew that with that
man he could do nothing, and he knew too what marvels were
sometimes accomplished by the example of self devotion. So
commencing with a weak and trembling woman, who was ready to sink
into the ground with fear and shame merely at being thus had up
before the eyes of the whole place, he easily obtained a solemn
recantation and abjuration of every form of heresy; and in a tone
of wonderful mildness, though of sol