a precipice falling sheer two hundred feet to broken rocks
below, offered great advantages." In a grave and orderly fashion, the
survivors of the conquered garrison were assembled in the castle
court-yard; were taken in orderly squads of ten up to the battlements;
and thence were thrust over into that awful depth. And so the account
was squared.

It is instructive to note that des Adrets, who ordered the vengeance on
Mornas, a little later abjured the Reformed religion and became a
Papist; and that Dupuy-Montbrun, who carried out his orders and who
succeeded him upon his recantation in the command of the Protestant
army, but a little while before had renounced Papacy to become a
Huguenot. So the leaders, the worst of them, shifted from side to side
as they happened to be swayed by pay or policy; and to such creatures of
no real faith were due the direst of the atrocities of those hideous
times. But the Huguenots of the rank and file were of another sort.
Their singleness and sincerity in their fight for their faith were
beyond question. They died for it willingly. Failing the happiness of
death, yet being conquered, they still held fast to it. In the end,
rather than relinquish it, they unhesitatingly elected--at a stroke
giving up country, rank, fortune--to be outcast from France.

For me the history of those desperate wars has a very vital interest:
for my own ancestors took the share in them that was becoming to
faithful gentlemen vowed to the Reform, and I owe my American birthright
to the honourable fact that they fought on the losing side. As I myself
am endowed with a fair allowance of stubbornness, and with a strong
distaste to taking my opinions at second hand, I certainly should have
been with my kinsfolk in that fight had I lived in their day; and since
my destiny was theirs to determine I am strongly grateful to them for
having shaped it so well.

X

But I was glad when Mornas, vivid with such bitter memories, dropped out
of sight astern. Sleeping dogs of so evil a sort very well may lie;
though it is difficult not to waken a few of them when they lie so
thickly as here in the Rhone Valley, where almost every town and castle
has a chapter of nightmare horrors all its own.

Even Chateauneuf-du-Pape--which we saw a half hour later off to the
eastward, rising from a little hill-top and thence overlooking the wide
vineyard-covered valley--came to its present ruin at the hands of des
Adrets; who, having