Comparatively few of the men who came in the second emigration had fought for the religion that they professed. They had learned to endure all things, and with undaunted courage many of them had suffered the loss of their worldly goods, the burning of their houses, hunger, poverty, and the imprisonment of their wives and daughters in distant fortresses, because they would not forswear their faith. Hundreds of their companions were at the galleys, hundreds more had been tortured, mutilated, burned, broken on the wheel. Women as well as men endured almost in silence the fierce brutalities of a debased soldiery, directed by priests and fanatics, who had, as it were, made themselves drunk with blood, and seemed to revel in cruelty. With a resolution that nothing seemed able to abate, pastors {11} like Claude Brousson went from district to district, living they knew not how, half famished, in perpetual danger, and with little expectation of ultimately escaping the stake or the rack. Nay, they refused to leave the country, while in the woods and wildernesses of the Gard great congregations of their brethren awaited their coming, that they might hold services in caves and "in the desert," as they called that wild country of the Cevennes and of Lozére. These men were non-resistants. They met with unflinching courage, but without arms. Those of them who remained in France stayed to see the persecutions redoubled in the attempt to exterminate the reformed faith. They were the truest vindicators of the religion that they professed. Up to the time of the siege of Rochelle, and afterwards, Protestantism was represented by a defensive sword, but these men discarded the weapons of carnal warfare. Only some years later, when the persecutors (rioting in the very insanity of wrath because their declaration that Protestantism was abolished was falsified by constant revivals of the old Huguenot worship) directed utter extermination of the Vaudois, did the grandeur of the non-resisting principle give way before the desperation of men who came to the conclusion that, if they were to die, they might as well die fighting. It must be remembered that some of them knew well how to fight. Some of their leaders—men of peace as they were, and men of an iron determination, which was shown in the obstinacy with which they refused to take up the sword—had come of stern warriors and were Frenchmen—Norman Frenchmen—Protestant Norman Frenchmen. A rare combination that;—cold hard steel and fire.