reprieve till it should be born. The captain was not for a moment
deceived, but he sent for a midwife and ordered her to examine the young
girl. At the end of half an hour she declared that the assertion of the
nuns was true.

"Very well," said the captain: "let them both be kept in prison for three
months; if by the end of that time the truth of this assertion is not
self-evident, both shall be hanged." When this decision was made known
to the poor woman, she was overcome by fear, and asked to see the,
captain again, to whom she confessed that, led away by the entreaties of
the nuns, she had told a lie.

Upon this, the woman was sentenced to be publicly whipped, and the young
girl hanged on a gibbet round which were placed the corpses of the four
men of whose death she was the cause.

As may easily be supposed, the "Cadets of the Cross" vied with both
Catholics and Protestants in the work of destruction. One of their bands
devoted itself to destroying everything belonging to the new converts
from Beaucaire to Nimes. They killed a woman and two children at
Campuget, an old man of eighty at a farm near Bouillargues, several
persons at Cicure, a young girl at Caissargues, a gardener at Nimes, and
many other persons, besides carrying off all the flocks, furniture, and
other property they could lay hands on, and burning down the farmhouses
of Clairan, Loubes, Marine, Carlot, Campoget Miraman, La Bergerie, and
Larnac--all near St. Gilies and Manduel. "They stopped travellers on the
highways," says Louvreloeil, "and by way of finding out whether they were
Catholic or not, made them say in Latin the Lord's Prayer, the Ave Maria,
the Symbol of the Faith, and the General Confession, and those who were
unable to do this were put to the sword. In Dions nine corpses were