In a most remarkable way there dawned upon us a new prospect at the very moment when we least expected it.  We were sitting one day in a tavern near Wartensee, and talking of our struggles with some strangers who happened to be there.  Three travellers were much interested in our narrative.  They gave themselves out as business people from Willisau,[135] and soon informed us that they had formed the notion of trying to get some assistance for us, and our enterprise for their native town.  This they actually did.  We received an invitation from twenty associated well-to-do families in Willisau to remove our school there, and more fully to work out our plans amongst them.  The association had addressed the cantonal authorities, and a sort of castle was allotted provisionally to us.  About forty pupils from the canton at once entered the school, and now we seemed at last to have found what we had so long been seeking.  But the priests rose up furiously against us with a really devilish force.  We even went in fear of our lives, and were often warned by kind-hearted people to turn back, when we were walking towards secluded spots, or had struck along the outlying paths amongst the mountains.  To what abominable means this spirit of bigotry resorted, the following example may serve to show.

In Willisau a church festival is held once a year, in which a communion-wafer is shown, miraculously spotted with blood.  The drops of blood were believed by the people to have been evoked from the figure of Jesus by the crime of two gamblers; who, having cursed Jesus, flung their sword at him, whereupon the devil appeared.  As “God be with us"[136] seized the villains by the throat, a few drops of blood trickled from Jesus’ wounds.  To prevent others, therefore, from falling in a like way into the power of the arch-deceiver, a yearly commemorative festival is held at Willisau.  The wafer is shown as a warning to devout people, who flock in crowds from all parts of the neighbourhood to join in the procession which closes the ceremony.  We felt of course compelled to attend, and as we wished to take our part, we offered to lead the singing.  I feared an outbreak, and I earnestly implored my friends to keep quiet under any circumstances, and whatever happened, to give no pretext for any excitement.  Our singing was finished, when in the place of the expected preacher, suddenly there appeared a blustering, fanatical Capuchin monk.  He exhausted himself in denunciations of this God-forsaken, wicked generation, sketched in glaring colours the pains of hell awaiting the accursed race, and then fell fiercely upon the alarmed Willisauers, upbraiding them, as their worst sin, with the fostering of heretics in their midst, the said “heretics” being manifestly ourselves.  Fiercer and fiercer grew his threats, coarser and coarser his insults against us and our well-wishers, more and more horrible his pictures of the flames of hell, into grave danger of which the Willisauers,