Very terrible is this truth-breathing description of the miseries of a city given over to the license of an unbridled soldiery; but the most affecting picture is that which he draws when closing his short narrative of those “evil days.” “I had nothing at that time but reports of those frightful crimes that, from day to day, were committed; and of all those things, that which grieved me most within myself was, that certain little children of the town, who came daily to assemble in an open space near the spot where I was hidden (always exerting myself to produce some work of my art), dividing themselves into two parties, fought and cast stones one side against another, while they swore and blasphemed in the most execrable language that ever man could utter, so that I have, as it were, horror in recalling it. Now, that lasted a long time, while neither fathers nor mothers exercised any rule over them. Often I was seized with a desire to risk my life by going out to punish them; but I said in my heart the 79th Psalm, which begins, ‘O God, the heathen are come into thine inheritance.’” CHAPTER XI. “A friend loveth at all times, and a brother is born for adversity.”—PROVERBS xvii. 17. THE Seigneur de Burie had not spoken without sufficient cause when he warned Palissy that he had made himself enemies of certain high church dignitaries in Saintes. Those admonitions he had uttered were not forgotten by the Romish ecclesiastics, who bestirred themselves so zealously, that after the city had been in the power of the Roman Catholic party for a few weeks, violent hands were laid upon the unsuspecting potter. He had believed himself secure from actual assault within his own premises, and not without cause, since he was under the protection of a safeguard, given him by the Duke de Montmorency, which expressly forbade the authorities undertaking anything against him or his house. It was also well known by both parties that the building in which he worked for the constable had been partly erected at the expense of that nobleman, and that, on occasion of an outbreak in the city which had occurred some time before, the leaders of the Roman Catholic party had expressly forbidden any interference with Palissy or his work, through respect to his employer.