intolerable flames, the said emperor had with
him a young man, holding in his hands a
golden cup of extraordinary size filled with
water, by whose assiduity in sprinkling the
water, the violence of the heat was
extinguished; and, while the emperor was
wondering who the youth could be, a voice
from Heaven said to him, 'Recall to memory
the monastery of the blessed martyr Lawrence,
on whose shrine thou conferredst a golden
cup; wherefore know, for a certainty, that
that youth is the blessed Saint Lawrence, who,
in requital, gave thee space for repentance,
and refreshed thee in thy torments.' "

The Norman Conquest, the life and death
of William Rufus, the Crusades, are all
narrated by Roger de Wendover; but he does not
grow veracious as the transactions he relates
grow more modern. He lies fast and furiously,
consistently, unblushingly, till miracles,
ghosts, falling stars, bloody comets, headless
men, talking beasts, singing birds, and dancing
fishes are so mixed up with battles, sieges,
charters, and chronology, that the brain
becomes giddy, the eye weary.

Verily Roger the Monk hath made my
heart heavy. Is the earth square or round,
or three-cornered? Is there an authentic
History of England? What am I to believe?
Where is truth?

Truth purest and most refulgent of the
feathers in angels' wings; jewel beyond
price and value—that thou art at the bottom
of the well who can doubt? Yet often and
often, does the bucket sent fifty fathoms deep
after thee come, after much tangling and
straining of cordage, up to the surface, and
lo! we have some lying pebble blinking in our
faces, while thou, Truth, yet lie deep in the
pellucid water. Old Roger may have sought
for truth. I hope he did. I trust he did,
but I am afraid he lost his way ever so many
times during his search for it.

Yet, what should we all be without Faith?
which, comforting, makes all things clear in
one greater mystery, when history contends
with marvel. And perhaps Roger the Monk,
simple-minded old friar, in his strong belief,
and faith, and trust, grew credulous, and in
things temporal forgot to discriminate, and
was afraid to rob one saint or martyr of one
miracle or marvel with which ignorance and
superstition had invested him—thinking that
disrespect to a saint was disrespect to the
master of them all.

A SHEPHERD'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY.

MY name is Edmund Spencer. I was born
in the parish of Rookdale in Lincolnshire.
My father was a shepherd in the service of
Mr. Wyham, one of those large farmers who
rent and cultivate above a thousand acres.
There were two cottages close together halfway
up the hill which rose at the back of the
farm-house; we lived in one, and the foreman
in the other. I had several brothers and
sisters, some older, some younger than myself,
but somehow we did not get on well together,
not that we quarrelled exactly, but they were
strong and active, while I was a weak and
thoughtful, though not exactly a sickly child;
and when I wanted to be quiet, and stole
away from the boisterous games in which
I always got worsted, they used to taunt and
call me sulky. And so it happened that I
grew to love little Mary, the foreman's
daughter, better than my own relations.

The foreman was a very kind man and so
fond of books that he was esteemed in the
village as great a scholar as Mr. Wyham
himself, which did not perhaps require a very
great deal of learning. Mary was his first
and only child, her mother having left this
world of sorrow in the act of bringing her
into it, and her father doated on her as if the
love he had felt for the mother had been
bequeathed by her (if the poor may be said to
bequeath anything) to the child. So it
happened that when he saw how fond Mary and
I were of each other that he took me also to
his heart, and I used to go into his cottage
every evening after the labours of the day
were over and share in Mary's lessons. It made
me very happy to learn reading and writing,
and when the foreman saw how eagerly I
took to my book he grew still fonder of me.

Those were happy days when Mary and I
used to wander about the fields; or sit,
sheltered from the sun by the leaves of some old
tree, spelling over the few books we could
obtain; or stroll down to the water-mill whose
distant rumbling could be heard at the
cottage, now fishing for minnows in the
troubled waters, now lying still, side by side,
talking, or rather thinking aloud to each other
with all the dreaminess of romantic childhood.

We always talked about the wildest things
we had heard or read of while idling about
that old mill. The wanderings of Christian in
the Pilgrim's Progress—that book which is
quite natural to the vague ideas of children,
the life-like adventures of Robinson Crusoe;
the deeds of the Old Testament kings and
warriors furnished an exhaustless store of
provision for our dreams.

There was something about that mill,
perhaps the effect of the sunny stream rippling
so gently up to the point where it dashed
itself so madly into the dark deep gulf
below; perhaps the story of a young man who
had come to the neighbourhood on a fishing
excursion a few years before, and who had
been sucked in while bathing and crushed by
that fearful wheel; which gave a gloomy tinge
to all our thoughts about it. It was the more
melancholy passages of the books we read
which most charmed and fascinated us as we
gazed on the troubled waters, and we had
got it into our heads, how or why I cannot
tell, that the gulf immediately below the
wheel was fathomless.

These are my summer reminiscences of
childhood; how the winter days passed I do