The death of royalty and of religion; the desecration of the tabernacles; the spilling of the kingly chrism and trampling of the Host! As night at last shut upon the boiling day, concentrating the heat, the cross on the now lonely bridge stiffened its back and stood awaiting the storm. That must fly far before it could reach the pole of its attraction. But it was approaching. The cross could feel the very ribs of the world vibrating under the terrific trample of its march. At present inaudible; but there came by-and-by little vancouriers of sound, moaning doves of dismay that fled on the wind, as before a forest fire. These flew faster and more furious, fugitives in a moment before the distant explosion of artillery. The rain began to fall in heavy drops, like life-blood from the lungs of the heavens. The earth sighed once in its sleep ... in an instant a great glare licked the town.... Hither and thither, swayed, bent, but stubborn; now shoulder to shoulder with the hurricane; now clawing at the stones to save itself from being wrenched from its socket; now stooping a little to let a flying charge overleap it--through half the night the cross stood its ground, barring the road to Paris. Then at length a bolt struck and shivered it where it stood. “It is gone!” shrieked the storm; “the way to Paris lies open. The last of the symbols of an ancient reverence is broken and thrown aside!” * * * * * * * * To Ned in the woods of Méricourt was vouchsafed a foretaste of this tempest that rose and travelled so swiftly; that, having for its siderite the pole-star of all revolution, rushed across a continent in fire so rabid as that it expended nine-tenths of its force before it might reach and charge with its remaining strength the electric city--the nerve-drawn city that had shrilled into the night that encompassed it, crying for reserves of dynamism lest at the last it should sink and succumb. But if the storm brought small grist to the actual mill, the morning, when it broke, voiceless and dripping, revealed sufficient evidence of how deadly had been its threshing throughout the fields of its advance. Over the north-eastern noon, and flying, a dull high monster, up the valley of the Meuse--from Charleroi to Maubeuge and across the border; down with a swoop upon St Quentin, and on with a shriek and crash into and through the woods of Soissons; opening out at last, from Pantin to Vitry, as if to invest the city and slash at it with a reaping-hook of fire--so the force had come and passed, like a tidal wave of flame, leaving a broad wake of ruin and desolation. On all the league-long roads converging to the central city were fragments of broken and twisted railings, of riven trees, of thatch and rick and chimney; on many was the sterner wreckage of human beings--poor Jacques and Jacqueline struck down and torn by branch or flame as they drove their slow provision carts towards the capital through the furious darkness. Not a dying Christ