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of beautifying the earth and making it glad and bright. And now, though their earthly glory seems to have departed, they still work on silently for old mother earth, enriching in their turn the soil from which they had once drawn their nourishment, reminding us of the "works" which "follow" God's sweet saints even after they have been removed from the earth, when the holy example set by them still lingers in the memory, exercising a softened and blessed influence on many a heart that had loved them in life, and now, parted from them, seeks to walk in their steps even unto death.

So the thoughts suggested by "seared leaves" in autumn are not altogether sad ones they have reached maturity; they are fulfilling their destiny; the fulness of their present time is come; they appear clothed in a softened beauty, a new glory, as if preparing for some fairer world, in which their old sober garb would be unsuitable; and then they fade, and in due time disappear from sight, quietly laying their heads down upon the bosom of the earth which had given them birth. And if we compare human life to the falling leaf, our theory still holds good as to the higher beauty which often seems to flash out with a burst of glory just before it is about to be extinguished. Who among us does not remember some aged face that stands out in our recollection, crowned with that "crown of glory" which surrounds the "hoar head" when it is found in the way of righteousness, seeming to reflect heaven's peace in the calm depths of the tranquil eyes, on the withered but yet unruffled brow, in the sweet gentle smile that wreathed the lips so soon to be clothed in death? Ah, how we loved the silvered head and the pure pale face, beautiful in the beauty of holiness, which, working within, seemed to break and shine forth without, like a faint reflection of our Lord's Transfiguration glory, when, as one says, it was as if the pent-up grace within wrought mightily upon the earthen vessel which contained it.”

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We felt as we looked on them that we should not keep them long with us: they seemed too ripe for glory to be left for any lengthened period here; they were like the golden ear of corn ready to burst, and only waiting to be gathered in. Sweet and lovely as, perhaps, they had always been, a new and more chastened beauty adorned them now, as day by day they lived more in heaven and less upon earth. The mellow glory of autumn sunshine seemed to fall upon them now; their faces, which had so long been set heavenwards,

appeared to catch a glow from the dazzling radiance which surrounds the throne; we noted the deepening, quiet sweetness which breathed in every look and tone, the lingering tenderness, as of one loath to say, "farewell," the bright hope and eager anticipation, as of one yearning to arise and go forth to meet the Friend whom their soul loved beyond all others. We saw this, and we knew we could not keep them; we felt we could not ask it, they were so ready to go; but we thanked God we had been permitted to see how perfect is the work He can accomplish in the soul that yields itself up to Him, to be moulded, by whatever means He pleases, into a likeness to Himself, and we thought, if such a glory rested on them here, how great, how unutterable must be the glory which remains to be revealed.

Sorrowfully we acknowledged that a great gulf separated us from them-we were so immeasurably behind them; but we remembered how in them the ripening and perfecting had been a gradual process, and we “took courage" as we reflected, that though we now stood covered with the dust of summer, yet for us, too, one day might come the autumn with its mellowing touch, when our dull commonplace lives, our cold hearts, our almost dead faith might ripen, and expand, and grow beautiful in the genial warmth of the golden sunshine, putting on the bright hues of firm trust, and undimmed hope, and calm rejoicing. This might be, even in us, if only we held closely to the Living Branch, from whence the true life flows, and did not suffer ourselves to be swayed to and fro, or swept away altogether by the rough blast.

For Nature teaches us that such a thing is possible: there are some "seared leaves" that, unlike those we have been describing, never reach maturity, but are scorched by the blazing sun, or nipped by the biting wind, or droop for lack of moisture, and so fall before their time, withered and dried up, when in the course of nature they should be green and full of life. They remind us of some lives we know, that seem blighted, marred, and useless; lives thrown away, as it were, for they fulfil none of the purposes for which existence was given. They have suffered themselves to be nipped and shrivelled by the cold winds of adversity, and have remained crushed and listless, so absorbed with their own woes as to have no eyes for those of other people. Living to themselves, turning from their fellows, meeting their advances with suspicion, repelling their proffered friendship with haughty indifference,

they live their lonely, unlovely lives-cum- into the inner sanctuary, their lot may seem bering the earth instead of seeking to enrich lonely and solitary, tame and joyless. and beautify it.

How different from what they might have been, from what they were meant to be! How different from those who, in childlike submissiveness, when God takes from them their choice treasures bow their meek heads in uncomplaining silence; and even when He comes again and again calling for yet greater sacrifices, and saying, "My child, I take from thee the joy of thine heart, the desire of thine eyes," still respond in broken accents, "Even so, Father; let it be even as Thou wilt," and try to raise their drooping head and look upward through the blinding mist of tears towards the rift in the clouds behind which the Sun of Righteousness is shining. Even as they do so the healing rays fall upon them; warmth from the bright glow steals into their hearts, the gentle touch of the great Healer's hand is already upon them, the keenness of the blast is tempered, strength takes the place of weakness; instead of drooping like the withered leaf, which hangs so sad a spectacle amidst the living ones around it, they seem to put on new life, to renew their vigour; a higher, nobler existence dawns upon them; they go forth to comfort others with "the comfort wherewith they themselves have been comforted; " to forget, or rather to put aside, their own sorrows in seeking to share those of others; life for them has a fuller meaning and flows in a deeper channel; it is a richer, sweeter, more satisfying thing than they had before dreamed it could be, even though, perhaps, in the eyes of outsiders, who cannot pierce

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To such as these comes the glory of the autumnal sunshine, shedding its tender light over them, ripening their fruit, casting a radiance over each failing leaf, making even decay itself beautiful, as it whispers that it is but the laying aside of the outer garment preparatory to the putting on of a more glorious one; the prelude to a new life soon to be entered upon, a life of beauty and of joy, full, perfect, complete, in a land where all is genial sunshine, and cold winds or biting frosts are unknown.

Let us pause here and ask the question, How will it be with ourselves? Will the autumn of life for us be thus beautiful? Will the close of our days on earth, come when it may, be marked by a visible ripening for glory? If, sadly and sorrowfully, as we look into our lives, we are forced to own that we can find there as yet no signs of such a close, let us not lose heart, but humbly set ourselves to make the most of the time yet remaining to us, filling our days with kindly deeds and acts of service, living no longer to ourselves but to Him who created us for His own glory, and has set us here to show forth His praises. Only let us remember that our own unassisted efforts are vain and fruitless. As the leaf cannot grow of itself without the help of external influences, so neither can we, unaided, form within ourselves one single virtue, or check one single vice. The power is alone of God, who worketh in us, "both to will and to do of His good pleasure."

AN ANGEL UNAWARE.
(A TRUE INCIDENT.)

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L. C. SILKE.

Before me stood a child with shy, grave look,
And wistful air.

I see her still-her torn frock, gentle face,
And soft brown hair.

I could not tell who the sweet maid might be,
Nor whence she came,

For I had never looked on her before,
Nor heard her name.

Wild mignonette she gave me, of pale gold-
Red sorrel too,

With grasses that had blossomed in the sun,
And harebells blue.

Then, all at once the world to me seemed kind,
The green earth dear,
The radiant air quick with the breath of God-
The heaven quite near.

A. MATHESON.

ΟΝ

SOME NOBLE OLD ENGLISH GENTLEWOMEN.

BY SARAH TYTLER, AUTHOR OF "CITOYENNE JACQUELINE," and
"PAPERS FOR THOUGHTFUL GIRLS."

I. ANNE ASCUE.

Na July day, three hundred and thirty- and who were alike zealous Catholics, figured one years ago, a remarkable scene was among the rebels. It is even within the witnessed at Smithfield. Blood flowed like comprehension of ordinary experience, that water in England during the reign of Henry the young girl who as a woman forsook those VIII. Noble names were covered with ranks, and stood all but alone of her kindred infamy. Two Queens laid down their heads in the maintenance of what she held to be a on the cold pillow of the block. Witnesses purer faith, may have had her youthful for what they knew of the truth "glorified sympathies engaged on behalf of the party God in the fires," not in London alone but who naturally regarded themselves as perseat many a county town market cross, and cuted, with their altars profaned, their venebefore many a remote rural church through-rable creed denied, their noble Chancellor out the length and breadth of the land. But and their good Bishop martyrs, and their in few instances did so many features of unfortunate Queen insulted on her deathinterest and pathos meet as in the case of bed and in her grave. Anne Ascue. She was a woman, young, beautiful, and witty, of a character so unstained that the worst reproach her enemies could cast upon her was, that she refused to return to the husband whom she had been compelled to marry, who had driven her from him without mercy, who abandoned her to her deadly foes, and as far as we can find, never stirred hand or foot to save her. She was gently born and gently bred, learned in a generation which produced such scholarly women as Queen Elizabeth and Lady Jane Grey, cultured with the refinement of a court, and withal she seems to have been a true woman in her godliness, wisdom, and constancy, warm tempered to rashness, frank, generous, indignant at baseness, faithful unto death.

England was in the moral and religious chaos of the first days of the Reformation when Anne Ascue was growing up in her father's house at Kelsay, doubtless one of the lonely moated granges of Lincolnshire. By the time she was a girl of fifteen, in 1536, the same year which witnessed within twelve months the death of the repudiated Queen Katherine and the execution of her rival Anne Boleyn, the Reformation was so unmistakable a reality, and had already abounded in such disastrous consequences to the Roman Catholics, that there was a rising against it in Anne's own county of Lincoln. A priest disguised as a cobbler led a great body of men after him. The gentry of the shire were drawn into the current and forced to join the insurrection. It is hardly a matter of question that Sir William Ascue and the family of the Kymes, to whom Anne's future husband belonged,

Anne may have helped with her girlish fingers to work such a banner, bearing a representation of the Cross and the five wounds of the Lord, to be carried by the Kelsay men, as Emily Norton was commanded by her father to embroider for the Rylstone band, and without the reluctance of Emily, who in company with her brother Francis, in response to the teaching of a dead mother, confessed in earliest girlhood another faith from that of her doomed house. Eventually the Lincolnshire rising melted away of itself through the politic mercy of the King, who, acting on sagacious advice, promised secretly an amnesty to the insurgents who should return quietly to their homes. Only a few of the leaders joined the northern Catholics who were up in arms and were not so easily dispersed. Thus the insurrection brought no devastation to Anne's home or ruin to her prospects.

We have no dates for the next important event in Anne Ascue's personal history which has been handed down to us; but all the indirect evidence tends to show that it must have occurred when she was a young girlearly matured, as times of trouble ripen before their day both men and women. I quote from Fuller, who gives the chief and very suggestive details of her earlier history; he again relies on the authority of Bayle for his narrative. "A match was made by the power of their parents betwixt Mr. Kyme his son in Lincolnshire, and Sir William Ashcough his eldest daughter, who chanced to die before the completing thereof. Sir William, loth to lose so rich an heir, and having payed part of her portion, for lucre's sake, compelled this Anne, his second

daughter, to supply her sister's place and to marry against her own will and consent. Notwithstanding, the marriage once past, she demeaned herself like a Christian woman and bore him two children."

All that we learn of Anne Ascue aftervards goes far to corroborate this account. Even when a girl she could hardly have been so yielding, soft natured, or weak minded, as to be a mere tool in the hands of those she was still bound to love and reverence. She had a will and a mind of her own. Every trait that is represented of her indicates a high-spirited, lively, independent woman. She was likely enough to have felt a strong recoil from marrying the plighted husband of her dead sister, even if Anne's feelings were not complicated by disgust at the mercenary motive of the union, or by any other inclination on her part. Her objections might not be removed, even in her Roman Catholic days, by the Holy Father's dispensation-not difficult to procure on the part of such good Catholics as the Ascues and Kymes. On the other hand Anne Ascue was so upright and reasonable, it is not hard to conceive that having been induced to make the sacrifice of her inclinations, possibly of her judgment-with what suffering and humiliation she alone could tell she was ready to do her best to fulfil her part of the obligation she had incurred.

It is impossible to ascertain whether Anne's turning to the reformed faith began before or after her marriage, or whether absolutely no other member of her family-the sister who died young, or any other person in the two households of her maiden and matron lifeshared her leanings. Taking Fuller in the order of his tale, it was after her marriage that Anne Ascue, in his expressive words, "fell off from all papistrie;" for it is subsequent to the account just given that he says, "In process of time, by oft reading of the sacred Bible, she clearly fell from all papistrie to a perfect belief in Jesus Christ." Whether or not her personal sorrows had led to the better choice and she had been driven, like many a man and woman before and after her, by the unrest and dispeace of her own heart and home to thirst for the rest and peace which remain with God, it is certain she had the opportunity from the time she was seventeen years of age of studying the Bible in her mother tongue. And a girl of so quick and fine an intellect, even if no higher and more human needs moved her, was sure to avail herself of the chance of mastering for herself the volume which was at once the canon of VII. N.S.

scripture and the bone of contention over which both factions in Church and State were fiercely wrangling. In 1538 the Bible was published in English with the King's warrant that all his subjects might read it, and instructions were issued to incumbents to set it up publicly in church where people were to be encouraged to go and study for themselves the Word of Life.* And we know from her own examination that Anne was in the practice at a later period of repairing to a church-the Minster at Lincoln-and reading the Bible there.

However, it was not in Lincolnshire alone that Anne Ascue came in contact with the great charter of the Reformation, and with men and women who braved every danger to ascertain for themselves—or by the help of their better educated neighbours who read aloud the principal passages in dispute-the will of God with respect to the laws that govern the Church and the world. Every account of Anne refers to her having been often at Court, where there was the most powerful reformed party, including the heads of such houses as Suffolk, Hertford, and Lisle, and latterly the Queen Katherine Parr, who were sure to welcome eagerly, and encourage with all their might, the first symptoms of Anne Ascue's conversion to the new views. Naturally in the hand-to-hand conflict, fresh adherents were coveted by both sides; and to the reformed side among the nobility and gentry there must have been peculiar pride and satisfaction in such a testimony to the truth of their cause, as the winning over of Anne Ascue with all her gifts and attractions, and in full recognition of the circumstances which gave such point to the victory, that she came from the very inner citadel of the enemy, since her kindred and antecedents were Catholic of the Catholics. In exact proportion to the exultation and rejoicing were likely to be the mortification and wrath of the camp which Anne had deserted. Accordingly we find they were impelled to desperate measures. All the Reformers' accounts of Anne agree in recording, that on account of her adoption of the reformed doctrines she was driven out of her husband's house and disowned by her nearest relations. Fuller says that it was at the suggestion of the priests that her husband took the violent step which, re-acting as it did on Anne's high spirit and determination of purpose, proved the means of severing the bond between them. Fuller writes, "And she on

• Burnet.

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this occasion sought from the law a divorce, and because of his cruel usage would not return to him again, thinking herself free from that uncomely kind of co-acted marriage by the doctrine of St. Paul, But if the unbelieving depart let him depart: a brother or sister is not under bondage in such cases: But God hath called us to peace.'"

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I am not aware that the Roman Catholics denied Anne Ascue's expulsion from her husband's house; but from the language used by Fuller, as well as from the reproaches addressed to her by the Roman Catholic historian, Parsons, for refusing to return to her husband, and repudiating him to the extent of declining to use his name, it would seem that Mr. Kyme, relenting in his harshness or better advised by his councillors, had made some vain efforts to induce his wife to come back to him. Her obduracy in this matter is the single personal accusation that the most foul-mouthed of her adversaries-and disputants were specially foul-mouthed in these terrible times appear to have brought against her. The worst thing her foes could say of Anne Ascue was that she left her husband at home and went gadding to "gospel and gossip it at Court, always subscribing herself not by her married, but her maiden surname." It must have been after her separation from her husband that the striking incident happened at Lincoln, which Anne herself is made to relate in the course of one of her repeated examinations. She had been told by her friends that if she came to Lincoln the priests would assault her and put her to great trouble, "as thereof they had made their boast." To quote her own dauntless words, "When I heard it, I went thither indeed, not being afraid, because I knew my matter to be good. Moreover I remained there nine days, to see what would be said unto me. And as I was in the Minster reading upon the Bible, they resorted unto me by two and two, by five and by six, minding to have spoken unto me, yet went they their ways again without words speaking."

We may surely trust that among these "three score priests"-with regard to whom their Bishop of Lincoln had proved an active persecutor of those who favoured the Lutheran doctrines-met together against the heretical woman in the cathedral, there were some whose manliness shrank from attacking a woman, and their courtesy from assaulting a lady, even as there were others whose baser spirits quailed before a loftier spirit, and whose doubts of the honesty of their cause shut their mouths.

But Anne was tempted to treat the remembrance of the scene with scorn. For in answer to an inquiry if there was not one that did speak unto her, put by Bonner, Bishop of London-doubtless with some impatience, perhaps with a little amusement, if Mr. Froude is right in attributing a coarse, good humour to the prelate in the middle of his grievous offences against justice and charity-Anne says, "I told him yes; that there was one of them at last who did speak to me, indeed. And my lord then asked me what he said? and I told him his words were of small effect, so that I did not now remember them."

Who does not see the strange scene? There rose the grand old Minster with its stately nave and aisles in "dim religious light." There knelt and stood the motley company of worshippers-the rigid upholders of the old religion; the ignorant country folks bewildered by all these changes, and in their scared trouble not knowing well what to believe; the wiser, more spiritually-minded men and women able to lay hold of the anchor in the flood, to cleave to it, even to awaken to a trembling gladness that it was being stripped of its various disguises and impeding integuments, and who were watching with secret sympathy and admiration, not unmixed with terror, the crisis impending. And the usual gathering must have been swollen by curious spectators, empty-hearted and emptyheaded gossips trooping in merely to gape open-mouthed and to be qualified to chatter of the threatened encounter between the perplexed priests and the bold lady. There were the black and white-robed figures clustering in the aisles, arresting each other, whispering vehemently, casting fiery or sneering glances at their extraordinary antagonist while they passed her, promenading "by two and two, by five and by six," as she has described them; yet somehow unable to nerve themselves for the ordeal which some of them had confidently anticipated, but which to many of them must have had an element of the ridiculous-not the least embarrassing and mortifying element to their pride-of challenging the one young woman who thus dared to defy them. Above all, there was the prominent central figure, still slender in youthful proportions, in veil, and ruff, and farthingale-never stirring from the reading-desk, where lay chained the great book in its oaken boards, its velvet cover, and jewelled clasps. One little hand traced persistently the black letter, while the face which men called fair, and which must have

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