of Amboise, carrying the king with them. This castle stood upon a lofty rock, which was washed by the broad stream of the Loire. The insurgents, though disconcerted by the betrayal of their plans, did not abandon the enterprise. They had reason to believe that the force that defended the castle of Amboise was not great, and that they should be able to overpower it. The day of assault was postponed from the tenth to the sixteenth of March. But again the Guises were informed of the meditated attack, and made all necessary preparations for receiving Renaudie and his followers.

But what of the king, while these strange events were in progress? Did it ever occur to him that his condition was more that of a captive than a monarch? It would seem that glimpses of the real state of matters did at times break in upon him. One day, it is recorded of him, he said to his wife's uncles, while the tears flowed freely down his face, "What have I done to my people that they hate me so? I would like to hear their complaints and their reasons. I hear that it is against you that they are so angry. I wish you would leave me for a little while, that I might see whether it is of me or of you that they complain." Unhappy youth! hedged round by audacity and falsehood, it is impossible not to feel sorrow as well as contempt for him. The men to whom he had made this piteous appeal gruffly replied, "Do you then wish that the Bourbon should triumph over the Valois Should we do as you desire, your house would speedily be rooted out."

We return to affairs outside the castle of Amboise. The 16th of March had come. Renaudie was leading his men-at-arms to the assault; but the Duke of Guise was beforehand with him, having been fully informed of all his intended movements. The assault was delivered; but, overpowered by numbers, Renaudie fell fighting, while his followers were cut to pieces or dispersed. Another body of troops, under the command of Baron de Castelnau, was surrounded by the royal forces; and deeming that the struggle had now become hopeless, he surrendered on a written promise that his own life and that of his followers would be spared. And thus the rising came to nothing.

The insurgents were now in the power of the Guises, and their revenge was in proportion to their previous terror, and that was great. The market-place of the town of Amboise was covered with scaffolds and gibbets. Fast as the axe and the gallows could devour one batch of victims, another batch was produced to undergo the same fate. Crowding the windows of the palace were the Cardinal of Lorraine, all radiant with victory; the ladies of the court, our own Mary Stuart among the rest, in their gayest attire; and the young king and his lords,—feasting their eyes on these terrible scenes which were being enacted in front of the palace. The blood, overflowing the scaffolds, filled the kennels, and ran into the Loire. That generous blood would, in after-years, have made every noble virtue to flourish in France. Alas! it was now poured out like water. Not fewer than twelve hundred persons perished in this manner. Four dismal weeks these tragedies went on. At last the executioners grew weary, and bethought them of a more summary way of despatching their victims. They tied their hands and feet, and flung them into the Loire. The stream went on its way with its ghastly freight, and as it rolled past corn-field and vineyard, village and city, it carried to Tours and Nantes and other towns the first horrifying news of what was going on at Amboise. Castelnau and his companions, despite the promise on which they had surrendered, were butchered with the rest of the prisoners. One of the gentlemen of his company, Villemorgue, before bowing his head to the axe, dipped his hands in the blood of his companions, and raising them to heaven, said, "Lord, behold the blood of thy children unjustly slain: thou wilt avenge it." That appeal went up to the bar of the great Judge. It was heard at that just bar, but the answer stood over for two hundred and thirty years. With the revolution of 1789 came Carrier of Nantes, a worthy successor of the Cardinal of Lorraine, and then it was seen that the cry had gone up not unheard to heaven. On the banks of the same river did this man enact the same horrible butcheries in the name of liberty, which the cardinal had perpetrated in the name of religion. A second time did the Loire roll onwards a river of blood, bearing on its

bosom a ghastly burden of corpses. When we look down on France in 1560, and see her rivers as they flow to the sea dyed with blood-the blood of righteous men ; and when again we look down upon her in 1790, and see the same spectacle renewed-her rivers again pouring a crimson stream into the ocean, and the bodies of her slaughtered inhabitants, cast up by the waves, rotting along the shore, we hear the angel of the waters saying, "Thou art righteous, O Lord, which art, and wast, and shalt be, because thou hast judged thus: for they have shed the blood of saints and prophets, and thou hast given them blood to drink; for they are worthy. And I heard another angel out of the altar say, Even so, Lord God Almighty, true and righteous are thy judgments."

The Reformation continued to advance in the face of all this violence. The same year which witnessed these bloody tragedies, witnessed also the establishment of the public celebration of Protestant worship in France. Up till this time the Reformed had worshipped in secret. But to worship in this manner was no longer possible. The very growth of Protestantism forced its disciples into the light of day. When whole cities, and, in some cases, well-nigh entire provinces, had embraced the gospel, it was no longer practicable for the confessors of the truth to bury themselves in dens and forests. Why should a whole city go out of its gates to worship? Why not take possession of its own cathedrals, seeing, in many places, there were no longer Catholics to occupy them? The stones and timbers of these fabrics had no conscience which could be violated, by being transferred from the one worship to the other. The very calumnies of their enemies made this step au expedient one. They had been accused of unnatural practices in their secret assemblies; well, they would henceforward worship in open day and with open doors, and so rebut all these charges. But this courageous course on the part of the Reformed stung the Guises to madness, and their measures became yet more violent. They got together bands of ruffians, and placing them under resolute leaders, they sent them into those provinces in which the Calvinists abounded, with a commission to slay and burn at their pleasure.

The towns of Valence and Romans, noted for their Calvinism, were surprised, the principal inhabitants were hanged, and the two Protestant pastors were beheaded, with a label on their breasts,"These are the chiefs of the rebels." These barbarities, as might have been expected, provoked reprisals. Some of the less discreet of the Protestants made incursions into Provence and Dauphiny, at the head of armed bands. Taking possession of the cathedrals, and turning the images and priests to the door, they celebrated Protestant worship in them, sword in hand; and when they took their departure, they carried with them the gold and silver utensils used in the Catholic ceremonies.

Such was the now unhappy condition of France. The laws were no longer administered. The land, scoured by armed bands, was full of violence and blood. The anarchy was complete: the cup of the people's oppression full and running

over.

The Guises resolved to pursue the advantage they had gained by the suppression of the "conspiracy of Amboise." In fact, they could not stop where they were: they must crush their rivals before giving them time to rally, or run the hazard of a second and more formidable revolt. They adopted two measures for securing their power. The first was to make away with Condé, the acknowledged head of the Catholic party; and the second was to compel every man and woman in the kingdom to abjure Protestantism. In pursuance of the first, they lured the prince to Orleans, arrested him, and brought him to trial on a charge of complicity in the insurrection. The trial, as a matter of course, ended in his condemnation; and the Guises were now importuning the king to sign the death-warrant, and have him executed. No sooner should Condé's head have fallen on the scaffold, than the abjuration, the second measure, was meant to take effect. A form of abjuration was drawn up, and it was resolved that on Christmas-day the king should present it to all the princes and officers of his court; the queen to all her ladies and maids of honour; the chancellor to all the deputies of parliament and judges; the governors of the provinces to all the gentry; the curés to all their parishioners; and the heads of families to all

their dependents. The alternative of refusal to sign was execution next day. The cardinal, who loved to mingle a little grim pleasantry with his bloody work, called this cunning device of his, "the Huguenots' Rat-Trap."

Never before had the Protestants of France been reduced to so great an extremity. A terrible blow hung over them, and they appeared wholly without help in the presence of the awful danger. The scaffold was already set up for the Prince of Condé; the executioner was already arrived in Orleans; the abjuration formula, already drawn out, would follow, and that would cover France with apostasies or martyrdoms. Verily it seemed as if the grave of the French Reformation were dug.

Let us mark the providence of God. All was lost, as it appeared, when, lo! deliverance came in a very unlooked-for way. An unseen finger touched this complicated web, woven with equal cruelty and cunning, and in an instant its threads were rent-the snare was broken. The king was smitten with a sudden malady in the head, and despite the prayers and processions ordered by the cardinal for his recovery, despite the images and relics which were carried

| in solemn procession through the streets, he rapidly sank, and before Condé's death-warrant could be signed, or the abjuration test put in force, Francis II. had breathed his last.

The king died at the age of seventeen, after a reign of only as many months. The courtiers were too busy intriguing to retain their places or provide for their safety, to think of the lifeless body of the king. It lay neglected on the bed on which he had expired. Yesterday they had cringed and bowed before him; to-day he was nothing more to them than so much carrion. A few days thereafter we see a funeral procession issuing from the gates of the Louvre, and proceeding along the streets to the royal vaults at St. Denis. But what a poor show! what a meagre following! We see none of the usual pageantry of grief-no heralds, no nodding plumes, no grandees of state in robes of mourning; we hear no boom of cannon, no tolling of passing bell; nothing, in short, to tell us that it is a king who is being borne to the tomb. A blind bishop and two aged domestics make up the entire train behind the funeral car. In this fashion it was that Francis II. was carried to his grave.

chicken's quill. This insect ascended rapidly by means of successive strokes of its one extremity or the other, till, having attained the surface of the water, it extended itself vertically downwards, and became perfectly motionless. The upper end, which was slightly elevated above the level of the water, was at the same time observed to have opened, and the opening to be occupied by an intensely black-coloured and highly-burnished small-sized globular body. In an instant or two more this was followed by a cylindricalshaped extension of richly-variegated colours; and immediately afterwards by the escape from the caterpillar-sheath which had enveloped it of an eminently elegant and symmetrical full-grown fly. At once the creature began to use its wings, seemingly with extreme delight, in the bright sunshine with which it was now surrounded.

Leaving this new-born tenant of the air to vault rejoicingly in the element into which it had just made its entrance, I directed my attention to its recent envelope. It was lying lifeless on the surface of the water, but tiding slowly, by the force of the spring from below, towards the circumference of the barrel, where now for the first time I noticed a little crowd of cadavers, or inanimate sheaths, which had obviously been subjects of the same change as I had just witnessed. This incident, although in itself rich in examples of the wisdom, power, benevolence, and sense of the beautiful manifested by our Redeemer-Creator, did not strike me very greatly at the time in these respects. I felt it rather as being a marvellous proof of his condescension and forbearance, and practically as a gracious rebuke in regard to the unbelief of heart which was still causing me to stumble at the evidence of his written Word.

As a matter of natural history merely, it is delightful to think of the examples, which no man can number or sufficiently admire, of the minute, painstaking, and profoundly skilful and benevolent works with which the earth is filled. The analogies, however, suggested by these facts in the domain of sense, rose higher in my mind as pointing to such as were still objects of faith.

It is pretty clear that the myriads of the insect race, with which our atmosphere in summer teems, must be animated by a surpassing sense of enjoyment during their short-lived existence. Their ova, too, already impregnated, must be showered down upon the earth towards autumn with such a copiousness and distinctive instinct of the proper localities, as to supply another most characteristic illustration of the condescension of our God to what we call small things. In the present case these ova probably fell on some moist situation, from which they were slowly drifted to a secure winter retreat in the mud at the bottom of the barrel. Here they were matured by the imbibation through their coats of appropriate nutriment, and developed into the full caterpillar form. The caterpillars, again, on the accession of summer, had become competent to rise from their dark abode, and yield up their now perfected living contents to their destined habitation in the atmosphere in the manner I have described. The thinness of the covering separating the yet unclothed butterfly from its proper sphere-the instantaneousness with which, when the critical moment had arrived, it passed into the air-and the transcendent grandeur of its new over its former being-were, however, the points which then most deeply impressed me. I felt that they shed a most comforting light on our position as human beings in reference to the eternal world; and subsequently, when aided by an enlarged acquaintance with the disclosures of the gospel of the grace of God, they caused me to rejoice that the natural laws of God are in entire accordance with his Word.

Here I shall only add that my own discovery of the truth as it is in Jesus enabled me to minister to my beloved invalid all suitable consolation during her lingering decline. When she discovered that I had found peace in believing, she remarked, in her own quiet way, "I knew you would come to it." It is long since that parting, and other painful farewells have occurred in the lapse of years. The shadows lengthen apace; but when this tabernacle is dissolved, I shall meet again with those who are not lost, but gone before."