gend or history tells us that at one time
the English took the city of Rheims, plundered it, and, as part of their
plunder, carried off the Saint Ampoule, which their desecrating hands
had stolen from the tomb of St. Remy. The people of the suburb of Chene
la Populeux pursued the invaders, fell upon them and recovered this
precious treasure. From that time, in memory of their deed, the
inhabitants of Chene claimed the right to walk in the procession of the
Sainte Ampoule, and to fall heir to the horse ridden by the Grand Prior.
This horse was furnished by the government, and was claimed by the prior
as the property of the abbey, in recompense for his services. He denied
the claim of the people of Chene, said that their story was a fable, and
that at the best they were but low-born rogues. As a result of all this,
hot blood existed between the rival claimants to the white horse of the
coronation.

At the crowning of Louis XIV. the monks and the people of Chene came to
blows, in support of their respective claims. The villagers pulled the
prior from his horse, pummelled the monks who came to his aid, thrashed
the knights out of every semblance of dignity, tore the canopy into
shreds, and led off the white horse in triumph. Law followed blows; the
cost of a dozen horses was wasted on the lawyers; in the end the monks
won, and the people of Chene had to restore the four-footed prize to the
prior.

At the subsequent coronations of Louis XV. and Louis XVI. they renewed
their claim, and violence was again threatened. The trouble was overcome
by special decrees, which prohibited the people of Chene from meddling
with the claim of the prior. By the time of the coronation of Charles
X., all such mediaeval folly was at an end, and the stately old ceremony
had become a matter of popular ridicule.

The story of the Sainte Ampoule is not without its interest in showing
the growth of ideas. At the end of the ninth century, a bishop could
gravely state, and a nation unquestionably accept his statement, that a
dove had flown down from heaven bearing a vial of holy oil for the
anointment of its kings. At the end of the nineteenth century the same
nation has lost its last vestige of reverence for the "divinity which
doth hedge a king," and has no longer any use for divinely-commissioned
potentates or heaven-sent ointments.

_THE FLIGHT OF THE KING._

At midnight of the 22d of June, 1791, a heavy and lumbering carriage
rolled