nardines consists of a coarse robe of white wool, with a cord round the waist, and a large black cross on the back, and cowl drawn over the face, and they wear a bronze cross on the breast. They rise every morning at half past four, then prayer and mass till seven o'clock, breakfast at a quarter past seven, consisting of soup, dry bread, and water, recitation of the Miserere at half past seven, and then they disperse to their various occupations in the fields. At every hour a bell gives the signal for prayer. When they are working far away in the fields the sister in charge of the party gives a signal and each one remains in prayer in the posture of a laborer resting on his spade. Ata quarter past eleven the whole community go to chapel till twelve, after which they march in single file to the refectory for dinner, which consists of soup and one dish, sometimes meat, sometimes vegetables. During dinner a chapter from the writings of the saints or fathers is read aloud, and the meal is occasionally interrupted by the ringing of a little bell as a signal for every one to stop eating for a space. Every Friday they take their dinner kneeling. After dinner, chapel, and then recreation till one o'clock. This consists in walking or tilling their little private gardens. At half past one religious reading, and at two o'clock they go back to the fields to work. At six, supper, consisting of vegetables and water; at half past six, chapel; then in summer more work in the fields till eight; in winter work indoors till the same hour. At eight o'clock, prayers in the chapel, and at nine o'clock, bed. On Sundays and fête days the working hours are occupied by prayer. The Bernardines now number fifty, and are under the care of a mother abbess and four Servantes de Marie. Whatever may be our objections to the monastic system, no one can but recognize the good work done by the abbé Cestac in providing a refuge for these fallen women, from whom it must be remembered no payment is either asked or taken, and even Mr. Chamberlain could not say of these poor creatures that they toil not neither do they spin. From All The Year Round. HERTFORDSHIRE. WILD forest was Hertfordshire, where it was not bare, wide heaths as wild and desolate, and that long after the country in general was cultivated and settled. The 'hams" of the Saxons are almost entirely wanting in the county, and even its chief town, to which it owes name and existence as a shire, was neither a tribal settlement nor the town of any great chief. Rather Hertford owes its name to the time when all about was a dangerous tract avoided by all but the well-armed and wellmounted hunting parties that pursued the wild game in these forest solitudes. Here might be met the fierce wild cattle of the native tawny breed. Herds of deer housed in the forest glades, and the wild boar lurked in the marshy jungle. As the hunt was urged with cry and horn, it was noticed that at one spot in the greenwood, where a labyrinth of streams had formed a deep and dangerous morass, the slot of the deer led by a patch of firm ground to a gravelly ford through the waters. Some British trackway no doubt had hit the ford ages ago, and the footsteps of vanished races had worn a track now thickly over. grown with the tangle of bush and briar, and all memory of the old Celtic name of the crossing had been lost, so that as the Hartsford it became known to the few that passed that way. And Hartford it was still when in the Danish wars a stockaded fort protected the crossing, and formed a strong post in the wood. And still it was Hartford when the Conqueror built a cas tle there to secure the passes into Middlesex. Long before, when the Romans held the land, the great roadway of Watling Street pierced the forest at its narrowest point, with a broad belt of clearings on either side, along which sprang up clus ters of villages and hamlets. And the wild woods once passed, there was Verulam to welcome the traveller with its strong walls and stately buildings, and the broad lake that protected and adorned the city. In the records of the monkish chronicles of the abbey, the most celebrated of these chroniclers, Matthew Paris, who was himself one of the brethren of the abbey, and who wrote in the thirteenth century, when many records that have now perished were open to him, describes how Ealdred the abbot, long before the Conquest, ransacking the ancient cavities of the old city, which was called Werlamcestre, overturned and filled up all he could. The rough, broken places, and the streets with their passages running underground, and covered over with solid arches, some of which passed under the waters of Werlam River, which was once very large, and flowed about the city, he pulled down and filled up or stopped, because they were the lurking-holes of thieves, night walk | ers, and outlaws, while the fosses of the city and certain caverns, to which felons and fugitives repaired as places of shelter from the thick woods around, he levelled as much as was possible. Among other materials were found the planks of ships, oars, and rusted anchors, which led to the supposition that the river had once been navigable to the walls of Verulam, and that possibly the main channel of the Thames had passed there. The most wonderful find, however, of the destructive Abbot of St. Albans was nothing less than a collection of rolls and manuscripts, the remains, perhaps, of the free library of ancient Verulam, one of which proved to be a volume in an unknown tongue, which turned out to be good Welsh, and an old Welsh priest, who happened to be living in the neighborhood, was able to translate it. And this wonderful volume was found to contain the history of the martyrdom of St. Alban. During the persecution of the Christians by Diocletian -so, shortly, runs the story-a citizen of Verulam, named Albanus, gave refuge in his house to a Christian preacher. The friendly act was discovered, and the people, furious against the Christians, dragged Albanus before the judge of the city, when Albanus avowed his Christian faith, and gloried in the act he had performed. Such treason against the majesty of the State was adjudged worthy of death, and Albanus was condemned to be executed on the hill where now stands the abbey church. Where the martyr suffered sprang up a clear spring of water. The spring is there to this day, to testify to the truth of the legend. It gives a name to Holywell Street, and still flows in front of Holywell House. Somewhere near the spring was built a humble British church in memory of the martyr, which, perhaps, was enlarged when the Christian faith became dominant in the empire. In the heathen times that followed, the church on the hill may have fallen into neglect and decay, and the renowned Offa, whose royal seat was close by at Offley, was the first to restore the ancient shrine. The bloodstained king, become conscious of his many crimes, sought to ensure himself against future punishment by his devotion to the new foundation. He endowed the church with his lordship and palace of Winslow, in Bucks, and from that time the Abbot of St. Albans became one of the chief dignitaries of the land. But while the convent flourished on the hill, the ancient city in the valley became more and more deserted, and in course of time the destruction of Verulam was completed by the Saxon abbots, who determined to build a noble church on the hill, and accumulated vast stores of building materials by the destruction of all the old edifices. St. Albans has other memories than of its old ecclesiastics. Here was fought one of the first battles of the Wars of the Roses, when the Duke of Somerset, one of the ill-omened Beauforts descended from John of Gaunt and Catherine Swynford, with the imbecile King Henry in his train, held the town against the Duke of York, who was advancing towards Lon don from the north-west, and who had encamped his forces in Keyfield. The town of St. Albans had clustered about the abbey in the form of an irregular cross along the lines of highway, and one of the early Saxon abbots had accentuated this form by founding a church on each of three extremities of the cross-St. Michael's to the south-west, within the ramparts of old Verulam; St. Stephen's, a mile or so to the south; and St. Peter's to the north, that guarded the highway towards Bedford. No wall enclosed the rambling, irregular town, but the entrances of the various streets had been strongly stockaded, and the king's standard was fixed on the slope of the hill at Goselow, looking towards St. Peter's. The Duke of York attacked the barriers in front, and was repulsed with heavy loss, but the Earl of Warwick, working round to the flank of the position, forced an entrance through some gardens in Holywell Street, and soon the cries of "A Warwick!" raised in the town itself, took the heart out of the defence. The king was wounded and taken prisoner, and a great slaughter of noble Lancastrians followed. Somerset himself, the Earls of Stafford and Northumberland, John, Lord Clifford, and many valiant knights were struck down and killed in the mêlée, and were honorably interred by the brethren of the abbey in Our Lady's Chapel. As to the more modern fame of Verulam, it is connected a good deal with the Bacons, who lived at Gorhambury, close by, while the stately effigy of the great Lord Bacon, with hat and ruff, seated in his elbow-chair, is the great ornament of St. Michael's Church. Some fragments are left of the old manor. house of the Bacons, but the present mansion is of the Georgian period. No male descendants of the Bacons were left to inherit the estates, which passed by marriage to Sir Harbottle Grimston, a man of note in his day, one of the Long Parliament, and afterwards speaker under | cleverly doubled upon the fiend by havthe Restoration. If we visit King Offa's ing a niche made for himself in the wall royal seat to the northwards we shall find of the church and his body placed therein the parish church of Offley an inscrip-in, an event once commemorated by a tion recording that the great Saxon king long inscription, not contemporaneous, of once lived and was buried there. At Of which two lines may be quoted: fley we are not far from Hitchin, a pleasant little Quaker town in the midst of green fields and gently sloping hills, and with its little brook running clearly by, and so past the old priory to Knebworth, the ancient and pleasant but somewhat sombre seat of the Lyttons. We may wonder how the sober blood of the ancient wardrobe-keeper to Henry the Seventh should break out at last into the nervous flood of the novelist and dramatist of these latter days, but in truth, though the lands came from the Lyttons, the lineage is none of theirs. The Strodes, Robinsons, Warburtons, and Bulwers all contributed to the making of the brilliant author, and from which line came the vital spark of genius it is hard to say. But while among the tombs of kings and princes, we should not have forgotten Ickleford, where one of a line as ancient as any of our Plantagenets, Henry Boswell, King of the Gipsies, lies buried. Nearer the borders of Essex lie the Pelhams, three of them lying as if in a rift among the forests, where adventurous settlers had established themselves. Tradition recounts the fame of one of these early settlers, a mythic hero of the dragon-slaying period - one Piers Shonks, who destroyed a loathly serpent that haunted these parts. It is said that the great old serpent himself took umbrage at the slaughter of one of his race, and promised Sir Shonks that when his - Shonks's -time had come he would lay hold of him, whether he was buried within the church or without it. Thereupon Shonks But Shonks one serpent kills, t'other defies, And in this wall as in a fortress lies. Shonks may be said to be the originator of those curious fancies in the way of burial, of which there are other examples in the county, as at Stevenage, where there was long shown the body of one who reposed on the cross-beam of a barn. Indeed, the county can boast its fair share of eccentrics, living or dead. One of the best known of these was Lucas, the hermit, who lived in an outhouse of his once comfortable dwelling, his only clothing a dirty blanket secured round his neck by a wooden skewer. In Hertfordshire, too, witchcraft flourished long after its general disappearance. One of the last witches seriously put on trial was Jane Wenham, a Hertfordshire woman, actually in the eighteenth century, and at the county assizes at Hertford. A strange feature of the case was the woman's own previous confession, although she elected to plead not guilty at the trial. The jury found her guilty unhesitatingly, notwithstanding. the efforts of the judge to make light of the matter, and the woman was condemned to death, although afterwards pardoned and set at liberty. In another case of an alleged witch tried before the same judge, evidence was given that the woman could fly. The judge asked the prisoner if this were really so. She answered in the affirmative, upon which said the judge gravely: "So she might if she could. He knew of no law against it." THE BOND OF THE COMMON LAW.- Much time ago a certain learned friend of the Mashas been said of the bond of common language sachusets bar (now on the bench of the Suand literature between our island and the At-preme Court of that State) was with me in lantic mainland; hardly enough, perhaps, of London, and had his attention called to a very the bond of our common law. There is a kind full and able French work on the history of of Freemasonry by which the English lawyer Anglo-Norman legal institutions, whereupon finds himself equally at home in Toronto, in he spoke words to the following effect (I soften the Province of Ontario, or Boston, in the the adjective actually employed): "This may Commonwealth of Massachusetts. You shall be very well, but I don't think you and I want fail in with a colleague of Harvard or Colum-a-blessed-foreigner to teach us our own bia College, and find him ready, after ten minutes' acquaintance, to discuss the high, grave, and dubious question whether a fee simple, qualified or determinable by limitation, was an estate recognized by the sages of our law, whose opinions have become canonical. Some common law." I would not barter that remark for all the possible eloquence concerning two great and friendly nations that can be uttered by the best of possible ministers—even by Mr. Lowell-in London or Washington. Macmillan's Magazine. III. ON PATTISON'S MEMOIRS. By John Morley, Macmillan's Magazine, V. SIR HENRY TAYLOR'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY, Macmillan's Magazine, Longman's Magazine, . Chambers' Journal, 195 203 194 AWAKENING, 194 ORANGE BLOSSOM: SONNET, 194 194 PUBLISHED EVERY SATURDAY BY LITTELL & CO., BOSTON. TERMS OF SUBSCRIPTION. For EIGHT DOLLARS, remitted directly to the Publishers, the LIVING AGE will be punctually forwarded for a year, free of postage. Remittances should be made by bank draft or check, or by post-office money-order, if possible. If neither of these can be procured, the money should be sent in a registered letter. All postmasters are obliged to register letters when requested to do so. Drafts, checks and money-orders should be made payable to the order of LITTELL & Co. Single Numbers of THE LIVING AGE, 18 cents. NIRVANA. SLEEP will he give his beloved? Not dreams, but the precious guerdon of deepest rest? Aye, surely! Look at the grave-closed eyes, And cold hands folded on tranquil breast. Will not the All-Great be just, and forgive? For he knows (though we make no prayer nor cry) How our lone souls ached when our pale star waned, How we watch the promiseless sky. Life hereafter? Ah no; we have lived enough. Life eternal? Pray God it may not be so. Have we not suffered and striven, loved and endured, Run through the whole wide gamut of pas sion and woe? GORDON. THE UNREQUITABLE. GONE, with the toil of nigh twelve months undone, Cut from thy grasp by sloth and treachery, When friendly hands across that sandy sea Gone when thy hope was high as Egypt's sun, To reach thee at thy post had all but won. From sting of failure and all charge set free, A man no king was great enough to feeGod's servant, taking wage of him alone. Gordon, we may not give thee so much earth As might suffice thy bones for resting-place, But must remain thy debtors in our dearth; Souls pure as thine are channels of God's And all our famished lives must grow more grace, worth When such have dwelt among us for a space. AWAKENING. DREAMING of the banks of WyeThere we sailed, my love and I. Skies were bright and earth was fair ; Naught knew we of time and care. Hope within our grasp did seem; Parting comes not in a dream. O my love, I dream not now, Weary is the barren land What to me were grief and pain, Could I dream that dream again? Temple Bar. WILLIAM WATERFIELD. ORANGE BLOSSOM: SONNET. FAR off to sunnier shores he bade us go, And find him in his labyrinthine maze Of orange, olive, myrtle, charmed ways Where the gray violet and red wind-flower blow, And lawn and slope are purple with the glow Of kindlier climes. There love shall orb our days, Or, like the wave that fills those balmy bays, Pulse through our life and with an ebbless flow; So now, my dove, but for a breathing-while Fly, let us fly this dearth of song and flower, And, while we fare together forth alone From out our winter-wasted northern isle, Dream of his rich Mediterranean bower, Then mix our orange-blossom with his own. Macmillan's Magazine. H. |