was so, however, and these respectable tradesmen had never before made so splendid a coup. Unfortunately, off the Island of St. Peter, they encountered bad weather, and two ships went down, with all on board. What must have been the feelings of the philanthropists, Pig William and Iron Hugh, at this misfortune? They got, however, five ships safely to Alexandria, and sold all their cargo, the Sultan of Cairo buying forty of the boys, whom he brought up carefully and apart, intending them, doubtless, for his best soldiers. A dozen, refusing to change their faith, were martyred. None of the rest ever came back. Nobody in Europe seems to have taken much notice of this extraordinary episode, and its memory has so entirely died out that hardly a mention of it is found in any modern history of the period. Thousands of children perished. Probably their mothers wept, but no one else seems to have cared. And the pope built a church on the Island of Saint Peter, to commemorate the drowning of the innocents, with the cold remark that tbe children were doing what the men refused to do. It is, however, pleasing to add that the two honest merchants were accused some years afterwards of conspiring to assassinate the Emperor Frederick, and so perished on the gallows-tree. In 1213, after the Children's Crusade, Innocent essayed once more to wake the enthusiasm of Christendom. He promised, as before, remission of sins to those who took the Cross: he wrote to the Sultans of Damascus and Cairo, informing them that the Crusaders were coming, and urged on them the advisability of giving up Jerusalem peaceably : and he informed the world that Islam was the Beast of the Apocalypse, whose duration was to be six hundred and sixty years, of which six hundred were already passed. Some, no doubt, of his hearers, thought that, such being the case, they might very well be quiet for sixty years more. At the same time he wrote to the Patriarch of Jerusalem with strict injunctions to