"Do you know what a poor member of
parliament is, ' hanging on' at every one's
beck and call, hunted by all, respected by
none, not knowing which to serve most as
most likely to be able to serve him—
would you like to be that, would your pride
suffer that? That's all these people want
of you—to make you their tool, their party's
tool; for you yourself they have not the
remotest care. Do you hear?"

"I do. But you have not told me, Mrs.
Creswell, what I should get for retiring?"

"Your own terms, Walter Joyce, what-
ever they were. A competence for life—
enough to give you leisure to follow the
life in which, as I understand, you have
engaged, in ease, when and where you
liked. No drudgery, no anxiety, all your
own settled on yourself!"

"You are strangely anxious about the
result of this election, Mrs. Creswell."

"I am—and I am willing to pay for it!"

Joyce laughed again—a very unpleasant
laugh. " My dear Mrs. Creswell," said he,
"if government could promise me ten times
your husband's fortune to withdraw from
this contest, I would refuse! If I had your
husband's fortune, I would gladly forfeit it
for the chance of winning this election, and
defeating you. You will excuse my naming
a money value for such pleasure; but
I know that hitherto it has been the only
one you could understand or appreciate!
Good morning!" And he took off his hat,
and left her standing in the road.

AS THE CROW FLIES.

DUE EAST. SAFFRON WALDEN AND THAXSTED
TO HARWICH.

- IT is impossible for our voyaging bird in
black to pass over the chalk hills and seven
streets of Saffron Walden, which is built on a
tongue of land twenty-four miles north-west
of Chelmsford, because there exists so curious
and interesting a legend about the origin of the
singular name of that town. The story is this.
Great quantities of saffron for dyers used to be
grown in this part of Essex. The first seed or
root of this valuable plant was brought from
the East by a shrewd pilgrim, concealed,
tradition says, in the hollow top of the staff which
supported his weary feet, and on which lie
hung his calabash of water. Lord Braybrook's
umbrageous park, with a pleasant wilderness
of shade, shadows the approach to Saffron
Walden, and girds that stately palace of a
house, Audley End, which occupies the site of
a Benedictine monastery founded by Mandeville,
the first Earl of Essex, "to the honour
of St. Mary and St. James," in the year of
Grace 1136. At the suppression it was granted
to Sir Thomas Audley, who took it as the title
of his barony, and in the time of James the
First the Earl of Suffolk erected a many-
windowed mansion here which took an army
of men thirteen years to put together, and was
regarded as the largest residence in the
kingdom next to Windsor Castle. A small portion
now only remains, and is a mere hut in
comparison with the old greatness. The castle at
Saffron Walden was built by the same proud
Mandeville who built Pleshy.

Not far from Saffron Walden is Thaxsted, a
small village, once a borough, rotten even in
James the Second's time, and then
disfranchised. Here in 1577 was born that laborious
and delightful old compiler of voyages, Samuel
Purchas. Purchas took his B.D. at Cambridge,
where, at St. John's College, he was educated.
In 1604 he became vicar of Eastwood, but
resided chiefly in London, being also rector of St.
Martin's, Ludgate, that vexatious church that
keeps getting in a rude and envious way before
St. Paul's when one is walking up Ludgate-hill,
and longing to get a clear view of the old black
giant. The great work of the old London
rector was his well-known and valued Pilgrimages,
or Relations of the World, a collection of
voyages, in five volumes folio, a stupendous
labour, worthy of a nation of travellers like
ourselves. How solemnly and yet humbly he
begins his work!

"First, therefore, I beseech Him, that is the
First and Last, the Eternal Father, in the name
of His beloved and only Sonne, by the light of
His holy and all-seeing Spirit, to guide me in
this perambulation of the world, and so to take
view of the time, places, and customs, therein,
as may testify my religious bond to Him, whose
I am, and whom I serve, and the service I owe
unto His church, of at least this my mite [five
vols. folio!] may be serviceable to the least of
the least therein."

After this fine and religious preamble the old
worthy goes steadily on through every country
and region of the world-resolute as Drake and
as furious a hater of the Spaniards as Raleigh.
His chapters on America breathe the old
Elizabethan spirit against the Spaniards, and he
seems never tired of railing at the enormous
cruelties of the conquerors of the New World.
In his ninth book on America (chapter fifteen)
he says, in a whirlwind of quaint invective:

"I was once present, says Casas, when the
inhabitants of the town brought us forth
victuals and met us with great kindness, and the
Spaniards, without any cause, slew three
thousand of them, and twenty-two caciques met us,
whom the captain, against all faith, caused to
be burned. This made the desperate Indians
hang themselves (which two hundred did), and
a Spaniard, seeing them take this course, made
as though he would hang himself, too, and
persecute them even in the region of death, which
fear detained some from that self-execution.
Six thousand children died in three or four
months' space, while I was there, for the want
of their parents, who were sent to the mines.
From Darien to Nicaragua they slew four
hundred thousand people with dogs, swords, fear,