children, with the aid of stones. Machecoul lies on an eminence between two departments; it was judged to be a good place for establishing a court of justice; and they massacred there for forty-two days, from 10 March to 22 April. The reader knows how the insurrection spread from the Lower Vendée to the Higher. It was brought about by an affair at Saint-Florent: an émigré had sent his servant, a Vendean named Forest into Vendée to preach resistance, and opposition to the military system. They tried to stop him, but he would not be denied a hearing; he openly preached revolt in the streets. A gendarme came to him; he drew a pistol from his pocket, fired at the gendarme and killed him. That pistol-shot woke those who were yet slumbering, And, mark well, when this unlucky shot was fired, the tocsin was already ringing in six hundred parishes; then it was carried by the wind in all directions; nothing could be heard but the ringing of bells, as though flocks of invisible birds were flying over their brazen tongues. The vibration of those deadly knells, which were answering one another from village to village, grew in volume, clashing in the air, charging the atmosphere like a thunderstorm, with electric currents of hatred and of revenge. Meantime, what was Cathelineau, the prime mover of all this, busy about? We will hear Michelet's version:-- "He had heard of the fight at Saint-Florent and the firing of guns clearly enough; nor could he be unaware by the 12th of the frightful massacre of the 10th, which had compromised the Vendean coast in the revolt past all drawing back. Even if he had not heard anything, the tocsin would have roused him hard enough: the whole country seemed in an uproar, the very earth trembled. He began to think things were growing serious, and whether from the foresight of the father of a family which he was shortly to leave, or whether from military prudence, in the matter of laying in stores of food, he began to heat his ovens and to make bread. First came his nephew, with the story of the affray at Saint-Florent. Cathelineau continued to knead his dough. Then the neighbours began dropping in--a tailor, a weaver, a shoemaker, a hatter. "'Well, neighbour, what shall we do?' "Quite twenty-seven of them had assembled there, bent on following his counsel implicitly. He pointed out first that a crisis had come: the leaven had done its work, the fermentation was sufficiently advanced; it was time to stop kneading, wipe his hands and shoulder his gun. Twenty-seven went forth; at the end of the village they numbered five hundred. It was the whole of the population, all worthy men, sturdy, strong, steadfastly brave and honest, the very pick of the Vendean armies, intrepid leaders almost always to be found in the front ranks, facing the Republican cannon."