persecution, stood gathered round the green mound that served as a
natural pulpit for a Calvinist minister, who more the dress of a
burgher, but entirely black. To Beranger's despair, he was in the
act of inviting his hearers to join with him in singing one of
Marot's psalms; and the boy, eager to lose not a moment, grasped
the skirt of the outermost of the crowd. The man, an absorbed-
looking stranger, merely said, 'Importune me not, child.'

'Listen!' said Beranger; 'it imports---'

'Peace,' was the stern answer; but a Norman farmer looked round at
that moment, and Beranger exclaimed, 'Stop the singing! The _gens
d'armes_!' The psalm broke off; the whisper circulated; the words
'from Leurre' were next conveyed from lip to lip, and, as it were
in a moment, the dense human mass had broken up and vanished,
stealing through the numerous paths in the brushwood, or along the
brook, as it descended through tall sedges and bulrushes. The
valley was soon as lonely as it had been populous; the pulpit
remained a mere mossy bank, more suggestive or fairy dances than of
Calvinist sermons, and no one remained on the scene save Beranger
with his pony, Jacques the groom, a stout farmer, the preacher, and
a tall thin figure in the plainest dark cloth dress that could be
worn by a gentleman, a hawk on his wrist.

'Thou here, my boy!' he exclaimed, as Beranger came to his side;
and as the little fellow replied in a few brief words, he took him
by the hand, and said to the minister, 'Good Master Isaac, let me
present my young son to you, who under Heaven hath been the means
of saving many lives this day.'