o exception to this rule. A short half-mile from the walls we
drew rein before a second encampment raised about a wayside house.
It scarcely needed the sound of music mingled with brawling voices to
inform us that the wilder spirits of the town had taken refuge here, and
were seeking to drown in riot and debauchery, as I have seen happen in a
besieged place, the remembrance of the enemy which stalked abroad in the
sunshine. Our sudden appearance, while it put a stop to the mimicry
of mirth, brought out a score of men and women in every stage of
drunkenness and dishevelment, of whom some, with hiccoughs and loose
gestures, cried to us to join them, while others swore horridly at being
recalled to the present, which, with the future, they were endeavouring
to forget.

I cursed them in return for a pack of craven wretches, and threatening
to ride down those who obstructed us, ordered my men forward; halting
eventually a quarter of a mile farther on, where a wood of groundling
oaks which still wore last year's leaves afforded fair shelter. Afraid
to leave my men myself, lest some should stray to the inn and others
desert altogether, I requested M. d'Agen to return thither with Maignan
and Simon, and bring us what forage and food we required. This he did
with perfect success, though not until after a scuffle, in which
Maignan showed himself a match for a hundred. We watered the horses at
a neighbouring brook, and assigning two hours to rest and refreshment--a
great part of which M. d'Agen and I spent walking up and down in moody
silence, each immersed in his own thoughts--we presently took the road
again with renewed spirits.

But a panic is not easily shaken off, nor is any fear so difficult to
combat and defeat as the fear of the invisible. The terrors which food
and drink had for a time thrust out presently returned with sevenfold
force. Men looked uneasily in one another's faces, and from them to the
haze which veiled all distant objects. They muttered of the heat,
which was sudden, strange, and abnormal at that time of the year. And
by-and-by they had other things to speak of. We met a man, who ran
beside us and begged of us, crying out in a dreadful voice that his wife
and four children lay unburied in the house. A little farther on, beside
a well, the corpse of a woman with a child at her breast lay poisoning
the water; she had crawled to it to appease her thirst, and died of the
draught. Last of all, in, a beech-woo