eating with a knife as clumsy as a butcher's, and without any fork.

After dinner we went forth in a body to see a goodly show or dramatic entertainment, which was to be performed in the Abbey quadrangle. I went half curious and half dreading what I might see, whether miracle-play or mystery, some representation to the life of apostle or martyr, or Adam and Eve before the fall, or some learned allegory of the Vices and Virtues, and metaphysical entities. But I found such things out of fashion; and when we reached the area, the people were laughing and shouting immoderately at a very broad burlesque on the ceremonies and ministers of the old religion. The comments and the play itself were spoken in a rough guttural dialect, which I could hardly comprehend; but, on the whole, I agreed with an old woman, who turned from the spectacle with pious horror, exclaiming,

"Well, to my mind, the old saints, bad as they may have been, were better Christians than they who mock them."

Mabel Glanvil laid her hand gently on my arm, at that moment whispering,

"Will you come to the church and listen to Master Nicolas? He is one of the exiles who have lately returned from Frankfort, and he reads the Bible every evening to as many as will come and hear him.”

I followed her gladly. The shadows of twilight fell heavily in the old Saxon aisles, and at the western end before the oaken lectern, to which was chained a large black-letter Bible, the reader was standing. He was reading with a clear, slow utterance the Epistle to the Hebrews. Around him were grouped old men and women, and boys, and fair-haired children, listening in reverent silence. As the Divine words fell on my ear with Master

THE FARM-HOUSE.

15

Nicolas's simple explanation, and I heard of justification at once perfect and for ever through faith in the eternal Atonement, I forgot all but the touch of Mabel's sisterly hand.

We then took a few turns on the terraced wall of the Abbey, which overlooks the river. The moon had just surmounted the trees, and shone on the old turrets of the Abbey, and on the shallow ford beneath us, crossing the quadrangle behind us with long shadows.

“Who would imagine,” I exclaimed, “that beneath the veil of that calm light are hidden the ruins of extinct volcanoes?"

"Did you speak to me?" asked Mabel, starting.

I thought of explaining my words, but remembering that both Reformers and Catholics agreed as to the propriety of burning witches and people possessed of forbidden secrets, I held my peace. "What were you thinking of, Mabel ?" I asked, at length, after a long silence.

"I was thinking," she answered, "what lessons that soft, pure star teaches us; for are not we also children of light amidst the darkness ?"

I pressed her hand and looked into her gentle eyes. The messages which Nature bears from God to the believing heart are never obsolete.

On Saturday we started on ponies and horses to visit a rich yeoman, who lives at Romans' Leigh, an ancient homestead, about two miles from the town. The scenery is the same as you know it; only freer, more park-like, more as in Germany: the heights covered with heath and short sweet grass, over which shepherds and swineherds still guide their flocks; the valleys rich with meadow-pastures, where the red Devon cattle browse: the hill-sides clothed with thick woods, from which ever and anon rises the white house of the sturdy yeoman or the mud cabin of the peasant.

This farmer's wife received us in her garden with respectful courtesy, giving each of us a nosegay of Provence roses and carnations, the fashionable exotics of the day, cultivated with many cares in sunny and sheltered nooks.

We were duly regaled with mead, and metheglin, and currant-wine, and honeyed cakes; and meantime our conversation was merry and varied. We discussed the alterations Sir Francis Drake (born at Crowndale, in this valley) is making in the old Abbey of Buckland, which the Queen has presented to him in acknowledgment of his naval services. We marvelled at the ingenuity of Sir John Hawkins in inventing a new branch of commerce; namely, that of exchanging the Moors of Africa for the gold and spices of America, a discovery, in reward whereof it has been granted him to bear a demi-Moor bound with a cord on his escutcheon. We spoke of the defeat of the Popish Armada by our fellow-townsman as complacently as if our own hands had effected it; and Mabel whispered to me the beautiful motto the Queen has caused to be engraved on the medal commemorating the event, "Deus afflavit et dissipantur," for Mabel, like many other ladies of this century, understands Latin, and has read Virgil and Horace, although she has scarcely heard of Spenser or Shakspeare.

In one thing, however, I find the times unchanged. The farmers are still on the brink of ruin. The old men mourn over these days of stone houses and effeminacy, and sigh for the times when England nursed her hardy sons in wattled walls; when every farm was a little, self-sustained state, living in glorious independence of all other farms; when every woman wove her own petticoat and every man made his own plough.

"Now, forsooth," they say, "the rich clothiers and merchants buy up our lands, or treat agriculture like their own beggarly trades, handing over our good English wool to the

foreigner, and importing in exchange useless and enervating luxuries, spices, and silks, and sweets; whilst the poorer yeomen are reduced, by the rise of rents and the introduction of these new-fangled methods of farming, to become mere tenant cotters. The Queen has, indeed, endeavoured to stop the evil by commanding that no cottage shall henceforth be built without having forty acres of land appended to it; nevertheless, the evil increases. The forests, too, are fast disappearing, and then what will people do for fuel? The peat and turf will not last for ever; and, besides, they want to enclose the commons. Some wild schemers, indeed, talk of a new kind of mineral or earth, called sea-coal, as a substitute for wood; but all sensible men know we might as well rely on burning copper or silver as on that. In short, the yeomanry of England,-they whose stout bows saved the nation at Cressy and Poitiers, they whose stout arms have many a time saved the throne and the country since, -the noble yeomanry of England are falling; with her yeomanry England falls, and with England falls the world."

Thus soothed by the reflection that even the clothiers and wool-weavers could not survive the general ruin, and by a dish of golden pippins (an exotic fruit, which the goodwife brought out of her store-chamber as an especial treat), we looked forward with philosophical fortitude to the days when Englishmen will have neither corn to eat nor fuel to feed their fires.

On our way home, as I rode beside Mabel, I endeavoured to turn the conversation to the literature of the day. Of Shakspeare she knew little, save that he made plays for the Queen. Of Spenser's "Faery Queene" she had heard and enjoyed fragments, and her brother was very fond of the poem; had repeated parts of it to her; but most people said it was a wild, mad thing, full of hobgoblins, wild beasts, terrible monsters, and enchantments; and she was half

afraid to venture on it. On the other hand, she was intimately acquainted with a host of smaller poets, whose names I had only seen in literary catalogues, and was soon quite beyond my depth in the earnest Christian treatises of Luther, Calvin, Beza, and other foreign Reformers.

On Sunday we breakfasted rather later than usual, in consequence of the greater elaborateness of our toilet. We descended, at length, much to one another's edification, in all the glory of starched ruffs and slashed sleeves, - Dame Glanvil's tire-woman having learned the abstruse art of starching cambric from the Queen's own Flemish starchingwoman, Mistress Dingham Van der Plasse. We all looked very wooden and uncomfortable, and I felt so; but Mabel, with her composed and quiet nature, seems instinctively to avoid all extremes, and, in her robe of blue taffetas, with a partlet or habit-shirt of stiff cambric, encircling her round white throat, she looked as natural and as unconscious how she looked as ever.

The good knight's family have had a new pew or box railed off for them lately in the church, and cushioned with velvet, wherein we all sat, and stood, and knelt, with a stately, yet condescending, devotion, preserving our hereditary pre-eminence over our fellow-worshippers, and at the same time presenting to them an edifying example of humility. But when the lowly Confession echoed through the aisles, and the words of Eternal Life dropped softly on our hearts from the Fountain so recently unsealed, tears gathered in my eyes, and the whole strange scene before me,— stiff dames, and stately squires, and peasants rudely clad, strange costumes and strange modes of thought and life,— seemed to float away and dissolve like a Fata Morgana; and I stood hand in hand with my brethren before our Father in heaven on the shores of the Infinite Sea. E. C.