“He’ll fall,” said one.

“Pish!” answered another, “it is steeplejack Jan, who can hang on a wall like a fly.”

“Look out for the ends of the rope,” cried the thin voice above, and down they came.

“Spare me,” screamed the wretched priest, as his executioners caught hold of him.

“Yes, yes, as you spared the Heer Jansen a few months ago.”

“It was to save his soul,” groaned Dominic.

“Quite so, and now we are going to save yours; your own medicine, father, your own medicine.”

“Spare me, and I will tell you where the others are.”

“Well, where are they?” asked the ringleader, pushing his companions away.

“Hidden in the church, hidden in the church.”

“We knew that, you traitorous dog.  Now then for the soul-saving.  Catch hold there and run away with it.  A horse should be ridden, father—­your own saying—­and an angel must learn to fly.”

Thus ended the life of the Abbe Dominic at the hands of avenging men.  Without a doubt they were fierce and bloody-minded, for the reader must not suppose that all the wickedness of those days lies on the heads of the Inquisition and the Spaniards.  The adherents of the New Religion did evil things also, things that sound dreadful in our ears.  In excuse of them, however, this can be urged, that, compared to those of their oppressors, they were as single trees to a forest full; also that they who worked them had been maddened by their sufferings.  If our fathers, husbands and brothers had been burned at the stake, or done to death under the name of Jesus in the dens of the Inquisition, or slaughtered by thousands in the sack of towns; if our wives and daughters had been shamed, if our houses had been burned, our goods taken, our liberties trampled upon, and our homes made a desolation, then, my reader, is it not possible that even in these different days you and I might have been cruel when our hour came?  God knows alone, and God be thanked that so far as we can foresee, except under the pressure, perhaps, of invasion by semi-barbarian hordes, or of dreadful and sudden social revolutions, civilized human nature will never be put to such a test again.

Far aloft in the gloom there, swinging from the arm of the Cross, whose teachings his life had mocked, like some mutinous sailor at the yard of the vessel he had striven to betray, the priest hung dead, but his life did not appease the fury of the triumphant mob.

“The others,” they cried, “find the others,” and with torches and lanterns they hunted round the great church.  They ascended the belfry, they rummaged the chapels, they explored the crypt; then, baffled, drew together in a countless crowd in the nave, shouting, gesticulating, suggesting.

“Get dogs,” cried a voice; “dogs will smell them out;” and dogs were brought, which yapped and ran to and fro, but, confused by the multitude, and not knowing what to seek, found nothing.  Then some one threw an image from a niche, and next minute, with a cry of “Down with the idols,” the work of destruction began.