y6 Wild Life in a Southern County 



procession of a martyr of the Inquisition to the stake. 

 His imagination naturally led him to picture the circum- 

 stances as corresponding to the landscape of fields with 

 which he had been from youth familiar. The executioners 

 were dragging the victim bound along a footpath across 

 the meadows to the pile which had been prepared for burn- 

 ing him. When they arrived at the first stile they halted, 

 and held an argument with the prisoner, promising him 

 his life and safety if he would recant, but he held to the 

 faith. 



Then they set out again, beating and torturing the 

 sufferer along the path, the crowd hissing and reviling. 

 At the next stile a similar scene took place — promise of 

 pardon, and scornful refusal to recant, followed by more 

 torture. Again, at the third and last stile, the victim was 

 finally interrogated, and, still firmly clinging to his belief, 

 was committed to the flames in the centre of the field. 

 Doubtless there was some historic basis for the story ; but 

 the preacher made it quite his own by the vigour and life 

 of the local colouring in which he clothed it, speaking 

 of the green grass, the flowers, the innocent sheep, the 

 faggots, and so on, bringing it home to the minds of his 

 audience to whom faggots and grass and sheep were so 

 well known. They worked themselves into a state of in- 

 tense excitement as the narrative approached its climax^ 

 till a continuous moaning formed a deep undertone to 

 the speaker's voice. Such men are not paid, trained, 

 or organised ; they labour from goodwill in the cause. 



Now and then a woman, too, may be found who lec- 

 tures in the little cottage room where ten or fifteen, per- 

 haps twenty, are packed almost to suffocation ; or she 

 prays aloud and the rest respond. Sometimes, no doubt, 

 persons of little sincerity practise these things from pure 



