hour, that warrior was routed, and fled from the field at the head of his scarecrows, for there was no resisting the power before which the Montignys and the La Mottes had succumbed.  Eloquent Gosson was left to his fate.  Having the Catholic magistracy in durance, and with nobody to guard them, he felt, as was well observed by an ill-natured contemporary, like a man holding a wolf by the ears, equally afraid to let go or to retain his grasp.

His dilemma was soon terminated.  While he was deliberating with his colleagues—­Mordacq, an old campaigner, Crugeot, Bertoul, and others—­whether to stand or, fly, the drums and trumpets of the advancing royalists were heard.  In another instant the Hotel de Ville was swarming with men-at-arms, headed by Bourgeois, the veteran who had expressed so alighting an opinion as to the prowess of Captain Ambrose.  The tables were turned, the miniature revolution was at an end, the counter-revolution effected.  Gosson and his confederates escaped out of a back door, but were soon afterwards arrested.  Next morning, Baron Capres, the great Malcontent seignior, who was stationed with his regiment in the neighbourhood, and who had long been secretly coquetting with the Prior and Parma, marched into the city at the head of a strong detachment, and straightway proceeded to erect a very tall gibbet in front of the Hotel de Ville.  This looked practical in the eyes of the liberated and reinstated magistrates, and Gosson, Crugeot, and the rest were summoned at once before them.  The advocate thought, perhaps, with a sigh, that his judges, so recently his prisoners, might have been the fruit for another gallowstree, had he planted it when the ground was his own; but taking heart of grace, he encouraged his colleagues—­now his fellow-culprits.  Crugeot, undismayed, made his appearance before the tribunal, arrayed in a corslet of proof, with a golden hilted sword, a scarf embroidered with pearls and gold, and a hat bravely plumaged with white, blue, and, orange feathers—­the colors of William the Silent—­of all which finery he was stripped, however, as soon as he entered the court.

The process was rapid.  A summons from Brussels was expected every hour from the general government, ordering the cases to be brought before the federal tribunal; and as the Walloon provinces were not yet ready for open revolt, the order would be an inconvenient one.  Hence the necessity for haste.  The superior court of Artois, to which an appeal from the magistrates lay, immediately held a session in another chamber of the Hotel de Ville while the lower court was trying the prisoners, and Bertoul, Crugeot, Mordacq, with several others, were condemned in a few hours to the gibbet.  They were invited to appeal, if they chose, to the council of Artois, but hearing that the court was sitting next door, so that there was no chance of a rescue in the streets, they declared themselves satisfied with the sentence.  Gosson had not been tried, his case being reserved for the morrow.