and hams, crowded together behind the table on which still stood some
empty jugs and dishes. The soldiers entered the kitchen, and after
savage struggle in which many were wounded, they seized all the little
boys and girls; then, with these, and the servant who had bitten a
lancer's thumb, they left the house and fastened the door behind them in
such a way that the parents could not get out.

The villagers who had no children slowly left their houses, and followed
the soldiers at a distance. They saw them throw down their victims on
the grass before the old man, and callously kill them with lance and
sword. During this, men and women leaned out of all the windows of the
blue house, and out of the barn, blaspheming and flinging their hands to
heaven, when they saw the red, pink, and white frocks of their
motionless little ones on the grass between the trees. The soldiers next
hanged the farm servant at the sign of the Half Moon on the other side
of the street, and there was a long silence in the village.

The massacre now became general. Mothers fled from their houses, and
attempted to escape through the flower and vegetable gardens, and so
into the country beyond, but the horsemen pursued them and drove them
back into the street. Peasants with caps in their clasped hands knelt
before the men who dragged away their children, while amid the confusion
the dogs barked joyously. The cure, with hands upraised to heaven,
rushed up and down in front of the houses and under the trees, praying
desperately; here and there, soldiers, trembling with cold, blew on
their fingers as they moved about the road, or waited with hands in
their breeches pockets, and swords under their arms, before the windows
of the houses which were being scaled.

Everywhere, as in small bands of twos and threes, they moved along the