THE LAST DAY


When I awoke (Thursday, 2nd October), and, hearing a great flourishing of
cocks and chuckling of contented hens, betook me to the window of the
clean and comfortable room where I had slept the night, I looked forth on
a sunshiny morning in a deep vale of chestnut gardens. It was still
early, and the cockcrows, and the slanting lights, and the long shadows
encouraged me to be out and look round me.

St. Germain de Calberte is a great parish nine leagues round about. At
the period of the wars, and immediately before the devastation, it was
inhabited by two hundred and seventy-five families, of which only nine
were Catholic; and it took the cure seventeen September days to go from
house to house on horseback for a census. But the place itself, although
capital of a canton, is scarce larger than a hamlet. It lies terraced
across a steep slope in the midst of mighty chestnuts. The Protestant
chapel stands below upon a shoulder; in the midst of the town is the
quaint old Catholic church.

It was here that poor Du Chayla, the Christian martyr, kept his library
and held a court of missionaries; here he had built his tomb, thinking to
lie among a grateful population whom he had redeemed from error; and
hither on the morrow of his death they brought the body, pierced with two-
and-fifty wounds, to be interred. Clad in his priestly robes, he was
laid out in state in the church. The cure, taking his text from Second
Samuel, twentieth chapter and twelfth verse, 'And Amasa wallowed in his
blood in the highway,' preached a rousing sermon, and exhorted his