with a really devilish force. We even went in fear of our lives, and
were often warned by kind-hearted people to turn back, when we were
walking towards secluded spots, or had struck along the outlying paths
amongst the mountains. To what abominable means this spirit of bigotry
resorted, the following example may serve to show.

In Willisau a church festival is held once a year, in which a
communion-wafer is shown, miraculously spotted with blood. The drops of
blood were believed by the people to have been evoked from the figure
of Jesus by the crime of two gamblers; who, having cursed Jesus, flung
their sword at him, whereupon the devil appeared. As "God be with
us"[136] seized the villains by the throat, a few drops of blood
trickled from Jesus' wounds. To prevent others, therefore, from
falling in a like way into the power of the arch-deceiver, a yearly
commemorative festival is held at Willisau. The wafer is shown as a
warning to devout people, who flock in crowds from all parts of the
neighbourhood to join in the procession which closes the ceremony. We
felt of course compelled to attend, and as we wished to take our part,
we offered to lead the singing. I feared an outbreak, and I earnestly
implored my friends to keep quiet under any circumstances, and whatever
happened, to give no pretext for any excitement. Our singing was
finished, when in the place of the expected preacher, suddenly there
appeared a blustering, fanatical Capuchin monk. He exhausted himself in
denunciations of this God-forsaken, wicked generation, sketched in
glaring colours the pains of hell awaiting the accursed race, and then
fell fiercely upon the alarmed Willisauers, upbraiding them, as their
worst sin, with the fostering of heretics in their midst, the said
"heretics" being manifestly ourselves. Fiercer and fiercer grew
his threats, coarser and coarser his insults against us and our
well-wishers, more and more horrible his pictures of the flames of hell,