A haze of uncertainty shrouds his original advent among the Huguenots. It lifts for a moment to show him there; and that is all. As soon as he has ridden within the Huguenot lines the clouds gather once more, and darkness swallows up his individuality. He tells one anecdote in the History of the manner in which the Huguenots chased Catholics in the hills of Languedoc. They tracked the fugitives to caverns half way up precipitous cliffs. Then they smoked them out with their treasures by lighted bundles of straw let down by iron chains opposite the mouth. General Pelissier plagiarised the device, with more murderous details, in Algeria in 1849. It is a specimen of the brutalities of a conflict, which its English assistants, though they had countenanced, would not care to chronicle minutely. To Ralegh's keen sight the struggle would soon have displayed itself shorn of the glamour of religious enthusiasm. He regarded it simply as a civil war, by which 'the condition of no nation,' as he wrote later, 'was ever bettered.' Of one of its prime authors, Admiral Coligny, he has recorded his belief that he 'advised the Prince of Condé to side with the Huguenots, not only out of love to their persuasion, but to gain a party.' English troopers on their return were not likely to dilate on their exploits at the Court of Elizabeth, who audaciously disavowed to the French Catholic Court the auxiliaries she had licensed. [Sidenote: _In the Netherlands._] [Sidenote: _The Middle Temple._] On the authority of an observation of the younger Hakluyt's, that Ralegh had resided longer in France than he, the period is computed to have been not less than six years. As he appears to have been in London at the end of February, 1575, that term would be completed within a fortnight, if he were present at the battle of Jarnac. The time covered the massacre of St. Bartholomew's Day, August 24, 1572. But there is no foundation for the story that he was then in Paris, and was one of the Englishmen sheltered in Walsingham's house. He had enlisted as a lad of seventeen. He emerged a man of twenty-three. Of this long and critical stage in his education we know really nothing, as we know nothing of his youth at school and college. After he quitted France it would appear from allusions by several contemporary writers that he served, about 1577-78, in the Netherlands with Sir John Norris's contingent under the Prince of Orange. Modern enquirers have doubted the fact, on the ground of evidence that he was in England between 1576 and 1578. The reasoning is not demonstrative. He may, if a regular combatant, have obtained a furlough to cross over, and see his family; or, from his English home, he may have paid a flying visit or visits to his brother, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, who commanded a regiment of the English auxiliaries. The dates are not incompatible even with a statement that he fought at the battle of Rimenant on August 1, 1578, though, had he been present on so famous