minded himself of the events of the previous year.

Three great assaults had been made by the Papists to win back England to
the old Religion. Dr. William Allen, the founder of Douai College, had
already for the last seven or eight years been pouring seminary priests
into England, and over a hundred and twenty were at work among their
countrymen, preparing the grand attack. This was made in three quarters
at once.

In Scotland it was chiefly political, and Anthony thought, with a bitter
contempt, of the Count d'Aubigny, Esme Stuart, who was supposed to be an
emissary of the Jesuits; how he had plotted with ecclesiastics and
nobles, and professed Protestantism to further his ends; and of all the
stories of his duplicity and evil-living, told round the guard-room fire.

In Ireland the attempt was little else than ludicrous. Anthony laughed
fiercely to himself as he pictured the landing of the treacherous fools
at Dingle, of Sir James FitzMaurice and his lady, very wretched and giddy
after their voyage, and the barefooted friars, and Dr. Sanders, and the
banner so solemnly consecrated; and of the sands of Smerwick, when all
was over a year later, and the six hundred bodies, men and women who had
preferred Mr. Buxton's spiritual kingdom to Elizabeth's kindly rule,
stripped and laid out in rows, like dead game, for Lord Grey de Wilton to
reckon them by.

But his heart sank a little as he remembered the third method of attack,
and of the coming of the Jesuits. By last July all London knew that they
were here, and men's hearts were shaken with apprehension. They reminded
one another of the April earthquake that had tolled the great Westminster
bell, and thrown down stones from the churches. One of the Lambeth
guards, a native of Blunsdon, in Wiltshire, had told Anthony himself that
a pack of hell-hounds had been heard there, in full cry after a ghostly
quarry. Phantom ships had been seen from Bodmin attacking a phantom
castle that rode over the waves off the Cornish coast. An old woman of
Blasedon had given birth to a huge-headed monster with the mouth of a
mouse, eight legs, and a tail; and, worse than all, it was whispered in
the Somersetshire inns that three companies of black-robed men, sixty in
number, had been seen, coming and going overhead in the gloom. These two
strange emissaries, Fathers Persons and Campion--how they appealed to the
imagination, lurking under a hundred disguises, now of servants, now of
gentlemen