THE PREACHING IN THE DESERT. Again we must pass over a brief space of time, and also somewhat change the scene, but not very far. In the interval, the acts of a bigoted and despotic monarch had been guided by the advice of cruel and injudicious ministers, till the formal prohibition of the opening of any Protestant place of worship throughout France for the service of God, according to the consciences of the members of the reformed church, had been proclaimed throughout the land. Such had been the change, or rather the progress, made in that time; and the falling off of many leading Protestants, the disunion which existed amongst others, the overstrained loyalty of some, and the irresolution of many, had shown to even the calmer and the firmer spirits, who might still have conducted resistance against tyranny to a successful result, that though, perhaps, they might shed oceans of blood, the Protestant cause in France was lost, at least for the time. The scene, too, we have said, was changed. It was no longer the city of Poitiers, with its multitudes and its gay parties; it was no longer the château, with its lord and his attendants; it was no longer the country town, with its citizens and its artizans; but it was upon one of those dark brown moors of which so many are to be found on the borders of Brittany and Poitou, under the canopy of heaven alone, and with nothing but the bleakest objects in nature round about. The moor had a gentle slope towards the westward. It was covered with gorse and heath, interspersed with old ragged hawthorns, stunted and partly withered, as we often see, some being brought up in poverty and neglect, never knowing care or shelter, stinted and sickly, and shrivelling with premature decay. Cast here and there amongst the thorns, too, were large masses of rock and cold grey stone, the appearance of which in that place was difficult to account for, as there was no higher ground around from which such masses could have fallen. A small wood of pines had been planted near the summit of the ground, but they, too, had decayed prematurely in that ungrateful soil; and though each tree presented here and there some scrubby tufts of dark green foliage, the principal branches stood out, white and blasted, skeleton fingers pointing in despairing mockery at the wind that withered them. The hour was about six o'clock in the evening, and as if to accord with the earth below it, there was a cold and wintry look about the sky which the season did not justify; and the long blue lines of dark cloud, mingled with streaks of yellow and orange towards the verge of heaven, seemed to bespeak an early autumn. There was one little pond in the foreground of the picture sunk deep amongst some banks and hawthorn bushes, and looking dark and stern as every thing around it. Flapping up from it, however, scared by the noise of a horse's feet, rose a large white stork, contrasting strangely with the dim shadowy waters.