verything that outwardly
symbolized it throughout the whole of the country that they governed.
Already this decree had been executed to the letter in and around Paris;
and now the soldiers of the Republic were on their way to Brittany,
headed by commanders whose commission was to root out the Christian
religion in the last and the surest of the strongholds still left to it
in France.

These men began their work in a spirit worthy of the worst of their
superiors who had sent them to do it. They gutted churches, they
demolished chapels, they overthrew road-side crosses wherever they found
them. The terrible guillotine devoured human lives in the villages of
Brittany as it had devoured them in the streets of Paris; the musket and
the sword, in highway and byway, wreaked havoc on the people--even
on women and children kneeling in the act of prayer; the priests were
tracked night and day from one hiding-place, where they still offered
up worship, to another, and were killed as soon as overtaken--every
atrocity was committed in every district; but the Christian religion
still spread wider than the widest bloodshed; still sprang up with
ever-renewed vitality from under the very feet of the men whose vain
fury was powerless to trample it down. Everywhere the people remained
true to their Faith; everywhere the priests stood firm by them in their
sorest need. The executioners of the Republic had been sent to make
Brittany a country of apostates; they did their worst, and left it a
country of martyrs.

One evening, while this frightful persecution was still raging, Gabriel
happened to be detained unusually late at the cottage of Perrine's
father. He had lately spent much of his time at the farm house; it was
his only refuge now from that place of suffering, of silence, and of
secret shame, which he had once called home! Just as he had taken leave
of Perrine for the night, and was about to open the farmhouse door, her
father stopped him, and pointed to a chair in the chimney-corner.

"Leave us alone, my dear," said the old man to his daughter; "I want to
speak to Gabriel. You can go to your mother in the next room."

The words which Pere Bonan--as he was called by the neighbors--had now
to say in private were destined to lead to very unexpected events. After
referring to the alteration which had appeared of late in Gabriel's
manner, the old man began by asking him, sorrowfully but not
suspiciously, whether he still preserved hi