Even more pitiful was the tragedy of the French children in the same year when the world really seems to have gone mad. The leader was a little shepherd boy of twelve, named Stephen. Matthew Paris in ponderous language calls him a bad little boy—I suppose he had stolen some cleric’s apples or done something else equally atrocious. The children in their madness called him St. Stephen; and he worked miracles. One morning in _July_, 1212, he thought he saw Christ, who not only accepted a piece of bread from Stephen’s grubby hand, but gave him a letter to the king, and told him to lead an army of children to the Sepulchre. The king of France ordered Stephen not to be silly, and forbade other little girls and boys to attend his meetings, and the parents, so far as they could, put them under lock and key. Just so and with as little success might we confine behind a feeble mediæval lock to-day a little boy who wanted to go swimming. Very few little girls joined Stephen. The heart-broken parents did everything that they knew to keep their little sons at home, and some of the boys were killed in a mad crush to get a lock of Stephen’s hair; in response Stephen promised that the Mediterranean would open before them and allow them to reach the Holy Land dry-shod. The richer parents sent guides; the poorer boys found their own way to the sea. The unhappy mothers could not tell us their feelings when they saw their sons thus dragged away by suggestion; because they could not write; but one would like to know what clerk it was whom Stephen saw and thought to be Christ. He, apparently, was the direct cause of Stephen’s delusion; he, and his letter.[16]