his broad shoulders, between which the head was deeply sunk, told a
tale of long sickness, which had broken a frame originally bold and
strong, and given a peculiarly ill-favoured appearance to a form
naturally well built; and when he arose from his squatting posture, the
bent and withered appearance of his crooked legs, which no longer
possessed sufficient strength to support the bulkier frame above, gave
painful evidence that the wretched man had suffered cruelly from those
common scourges of his class at that period--rheumatism and ague.
Clasped between his hands was a rosary of wood; and, as he rose, he
pressed it to his lips, and then deposited it in the upper part of his
garment.

"No, no!" exclaimed the cripple aloud, when he had staggered to his
feet. "No, it is not vengeance--it is not, God knows; although the
malevolence of those hideous and accursed hags, those lemans of
Satan"--and he spat upon the ground--"have made me the wretched outcast
of humanity I am. The blood of the foul one has been shed for His glory
only, and that of the blessed Virgin, to the destruction of the
arch-enemy of mankind and his delusions!"

"Thou knowest it is so," he added, again clutching forth the rosary from
his bosom, which, after gazing upon a rude personification of the
Virgin, stamped upon a tiny plate of copper at the end of the string of
beads, and devoutly making the sign of the cross, he returned to its
usual depository.

"I have cried against the handmaid of Beelzebub--uttering cry for cry as
she shrieked out her wretched soul. I have prayed earnestly and long,
and I am athirst," continued the cripple, as he dragged his distorted
limbs with difficulty over the rough stones towards a large covered
well, which occupied the lower part of the market-place.

As the beggar approached the parapet of the well, to drink from one of
the buckets which reposed upon its edge, he became first aware of the
presence of another human being. Half-concealed behind one of the
twisted columns that supported the Gothic pavilion above, sat upon the
parapet a female figure, dressed in a black garb of such a form and
nature, that, without being the exact costume of any known religious
order, it bore a monastic character. Her face, as she sat with her head
bent down over her clasped hands, in an attitude of mournful
humiliation, was fully concealed by a black hood. But when, upon the
approach of the beggar, she started up hastily, as if impe