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Show 446 THE LILY .AND THE TOTEM. and lay in undistinguished heaps upon the earth ; but the entire skeletons of many, unbroken, still waved in the unconscious breezes of heaven 1 For two weary years had they been thus tossed and shaken in the tempest. For two years had they thus waved, ghastly, white, and terrible, in mockery of the blessed sunshine! And now, in the genial breezes of April, they still shook aloft iu horrible contrast with tho green leaves, and the purple blossoms of the spring around them ! But they were now decreed to take their shame from the suffering eyes of day 1 A solemn service was snid over the wretched remains, which were taken down with cautious hands, as considerately a.s if they were still accessible to hurt, and buried in one common grave ! The red-men looked on wondering, :md in grave silence ; and llolata Cara, leaning upon his spear, might almost be thought to weep at tho cruel spectacle. But his aspect changed when the Spanish cn.ptives were brought forth. They were ranged, manacled in pairs, beneath the same tree of sacrifice. Briefly, and in stern accents, did Gourgues recite the crime of which they had been guilty, and which they wore now to expiate by a sufferance of the same fate which they had decreed to their victims ! Prayers and pleadings were alike in vain. The priest who bad performed the solemn rites for the dead, now performed the last duties for the living judged ! He heard their confessions. Oue of the wretched victims confessed that the judgment under which be wna about to suffer was a just one ; that he himself, with his own l1:tnds, had hung no less than five of the wretched lluguenots. With such a confession ringing in their cars, it was not possible for the French to be merciful! At a given signal, the victims were run up to the deadly branches, which they themselves had Mcurscd by such employment; and DOlli:\'IQUE DE GOURCUES. 447 even while their suspended forms writhed nnd quivered witl1 tho last fruitless eff?rts of expiring consciousness, the chieftain ITolata Cnra looked upon them with a cold, hard <'ye, stern and tearless, as if he felt tho dreadful propriety of this wild and unrelenting justice ! 1.'he deed done-the expiation made-Gourgucs t!Jcu procured a huge plank of pine, upon which he caused to be branded, with a. scaring iron, iu rude, but large, intelligible characters, these words, corre1~ponding to that inscription put by tl10 Spaniards over the Huguenots, and as a fitting commentary upon it:- " ilr~rsc arc not l)tmg ao 5paniarbs, nor as £llarinrrs, but as Qrraitors, Robbers, Llllb .£11nrbmra!" How long they hung thus, bleaching in storm and sunshine; how long this terrible inscription rcmnincd as n record of their crime and of thia history, the ehronicb do.!s not show, nor is it needful. The record is inscribed in pages that survive storm, and wreck, n.nd fire ;-more indelibly written than on pillars of brass and marble ! It hangs on high forever, where the eyes of the criminal may read how certainly will the vengeance of heaven alight, or soon or late, upon the offender, who wantonly exults in tho moment of security io the commission of gr~Jat. crimes done upon suffering humauity. |