The miller suddenly dashed up with a shout.  He heard his wife scream above the rattle of the mill, and stumbling over basement litter he unstopped a loophole and saw the village already mounting in flames.

The mill door’s iron-clamped timbers were beaten by a crowd of entreating hands, and he tore back the fastenings and dragged his neighbors in.  Children, women, men, fell past him on the basement floor, and he screamed for help to hold the door against Montgomery’s men.  The priest was the last one to enter and the first to set a shoulder with the miller’s.  A discharge of firearms from without made lightning in the dim inclosure, and the cure, Father Robineau de Portneuf, reminded his flock of the guns they had stored in the mill basement.  Loopholes were soon manned, and the enemy were driven back from the mill door.  The roaring torch of each cottage thatch showed them in the redness of their uniforms,—­good marks for enraged refugees; so they drew a little farther westward still, along the hot narrow street of San Joachim du Petit Cap.

At an unoccupied loophole Father Robineau watched his chapel burning, with its meagre enrichments, added year by year.  But this was nothing, when his eye dropped to the two or three figures lying face downward on the road.  He turned himself toward the wailing of a widow and a mother.

The miller’s wife was coming downstairs with a candle, leaving her children huddled in darkness at the top.  Those two dozen or more people whom she could see lifting dazed looks at her were perhaps of small account in the province; but they were her friends and neighbors, and bounded her whole experience of the world, except that anxiety of having her son Laurent with Montcalm’s militia.  The dip light dropped tallow down her petticoat, and even unheeded on one bare foot.

“My children,” exhorted Father Robineau through the wailing of bereaved women, “have patience.”  The miller’s wife stooped and passed a hand across a bright head leaning against the stair side.

“Thy mother is safe, Angele?”

“Oh, yes, Madame Sandeau.”

“Thy father and the children are safe?”

“Oh, yes,” testified the miller, passing towards the fireplace, “La Vigne and all his are within.  I counted them.”

“The saints be praised,” said his wife.

“Yes, La Vigne got in safely,” added the miller, “while that excellent Jules Martin, our good neighbor, lies scalped out there in the road."[1]

“He does not know what he is saying, Angele,” whispered his wife to the weeping girl.  But the miller snatched the candle from the hearth as if he meant to fling his indignation with it at La Vigne.  His worthy act, however, was to light the sticks he kept built in the fireplace for such emergency.  A flame arose, gradually revealing the black earthen floor, the swarm of refugees, and even the tear-suspending lashes of little children’s eyes.