We alight at Brocklebank Fells. “Sure, there is room within our hearts good store;For we can lodge transgressions by the score:Thousands of toys dwell there, yet out of door        We leave Thee.”                     George Herbert. “Girls!” said my Aunt Kezia, looking round... more...

Preface. More than three hundred years have rolled away since the events narrated in the following pages stirred the souls of men; since John Bradford sat down to his “merry supper with the Lord;” since Lawrence Saunders slept peacefully at the stake, lifted over the dark river in the arms of God; since Ridley and Latimer, on that autumn morning at Oxford, lighted that candle in England which they trusted by God’s grace... more...

Jenny prepares to go a-journeying. “Jenny, my dear maid, thou wilt never fetch white meal out of a sack of sea-coal.” Jenny tossed her head. It would have been a nice little brown head, if it had not been quite so fond of tossing itself. But Jenny was just sixteen, and laboured under a delusion which besets young folks of that age—namely, that half the brains in the world had got into her head, and very few had been left in her... more...

Choosing a new gown. “Give you good den, Master Clere!” said a rosy-faced countrywoman with a basket on her arm, as she came into one of the largest clothier’s shops in Colchester. It was an odd way of saying “Good Evening,” but this was the way in which they said it in 1556. The rosy-faced woman set down her basket on the counter, and looked round the shop in the leisurely way of somebody who was in no particular... more...

Phoebe arrives at White-Ladies. “The sailing of a cloud hath Providence to its pilot.” Martin Farquhar Tupper. In the handsome parlour of Cressingham Abbey, commonly called White-Ladies, on a dull afternoon in January, 1712, sat Madam and her granddaughter, Rhoda, sipping tea. Madam—and nothing else, her dependants would have thought it an impertinence to call her Mrs Furnival. Never was Empress of all the Russias... more...

Preface. It is said that only travellers in the arid lands of the East really know the value of water. To them the Well in the Desert is a treasure and a blessing: unspeakably so, when the water is pure and sweet; yet even though it be salt and brackish, it may still save life. Was it less so, in a figurative sense, to the travellers through that great desert of the Middle Ages, wherein the wells were so few and far between? True, the water... more...

Preface. The thirteenth century was one of rapid and terrible incidents, tumultuous politics, and in religious matters of low and degrading superstition. Transubstantiation had just been formally adopted as a dogma of the Church, accompanied as it always is by sacramental confession, and quickly followed by the elevation of the host and the invention of the pix. Various Orders of monks were flocking into England. The Pope was doing his best,... more...

Chapter One. The last Night in the Old Home. “Which speaks the truth - fair Hope or ghastly Fear?        God knoweth, and not I.Only, o’er both, Love holds her torch aloft,        And will, until I die.” “Fiddle-de-dee!... more...

Preface. On the crowded canvas of the fourteenth century stands out as one of its most prominent figures that of the warrior Countess of Montfort. No reader of Froissart’s Chronicle can forget the siege of Hennebon, and the valiant part she played in the defence of her son’s dominions. Actuated by more personal motives than the peasant maid, she was nevertheless the Joan of Arc of her day, and of Bretagne. What became of her?... more...