The Brazen Android: In Two Parts. Part One

WHO can rebuild before the eye of the mind a single ordinary dwelling of the vanished London of the middle of the thirteenth century ? It was a dwarfish, squalid structure, of such crazy unsubstantiality that, with a stout iron crook and two strong cords, provided by the ward, it might be pulled down and dragged off speedily in case of fire ; a structure of one story jutting over a low ground floor, with another jut of eaves above, its roof perchance engrailed with gables, its front bearing an odd resemblance to the back of a couple of huge stairs, and the whole a most rickety, tumble-down, top-heavy, fantastical thing. Chimneys were fairly in vogue then, so it had them, squat, square, wide-mouthed, faced with white plaster, red tiles, or gray pebble-work. Red tiles covered its roof ; its walls were of rough - planed planks, or a wooden framework filled with a composite of straw and clay, buttressed with posts, and crossed this way and that with supporting beams, — the whole daubed over with whitewash, of which the weather soon made graywash. In front was a stairway, sometimes covered, sometimes not, or a step-ladder set slantwise against the wall, for an entrance to the upper story. The doorways were narrow and low, the windows also ; and the latter, darkened with overbrows of wooden shutters, propped up from beneath, and sticking out like long, slender awnings, were further darkened by sashes of parchment, linen, or thin-shaven horn, for glass came from Flanders, and was costly and rare.

Such, joint and seam and tile being loosened into crack and cranny and crevice everywhere, was the dwelling of the London citizen as the eye might see it in the middle of the thirteenth century. Multiply that dwelling into a tortuous and broken perspective of like buildings, some joined by party-walls, some with spaces between, all pent-roofed or gablepeaked, heavy -eaved, stub-chimneyed, narrow-latticed, awning-shuttered, staircased, post - buttressed, beam - crossed, dusky - red - roofed, dingy - white - walled, and low under the overhanging vastness of the sky, and you have an ancient London street, which shall be foul and narrow, with open drains, footways roughly flagged and horseway deep with slushy mire, overstrewn with ashes, shards, and offal, and smelling abominably. There were, indeed, at that period, thinly interspersed here and there, houses of somewhat better description, solidly built of stone and timber, though at best strangely deficient in comfort and convenience, according to the fashion of that most inconvenient and uncomfortable age. Here and there, too, for those were the times of the feudal soldier and priest, rose in dreadful - beauteous contrast with the squalid city the architectural grandeurs of church and cathedral, or the stately house or palace of bishop or earl. But all around stretched dwellings which our poorest modern house excels, and on those dwellings all evils and discomforts that can befall had their quarry.

Light came dim, and sunshine dimly glimmering, into their darkened rooms. Summer heats made ovens of them. The old gray family of London fogs rose from the marshes north of the city walls, from the city’s intersecting rivulets, from the Thames below, and crept in at every opening to make all dark and chill within. Down their squat chimneys swept the smoke, choking and blinding. Rains such as even rainy England knows not now soaked them through for weeks together. Cold such as English winters have forgotten now pierced, with griping blast and silent-sifting snow, to their shivering inmates. Foul exhalations from the filthy streets hung around them an air of poison, or, rising from the cesspools, of which every house had one within, discharged themselves in deadly maladies. Lightnings stabbed their roofs or rent their walls, hunting for those they sheltered. Conflagration, lurking in a spark, upspread in dragonish flame, and roared through them devouring. Whirlwind swept through them howling, and tossed them down by fifties. Pestilence breathed through them in recurring seasons, and left their rooms aghast with corpses. Civic riot or intestine war stormed often near them, and brought them death and sorrow. Famine arose every few years, and walked through them on his way through England, leaving their tenants lean and pale or lifeless. Often into them broke the midnight robber, single or in gangs; often to them came the gatherer of taxes or of tithes; upon them hung perpetually all the bloodsuckers, every vampire which an age of ignorance and tyranny could spawn; and in them herded low lusts and passions, fiendish biogtries, crazy superstitions, brutish illiteracy, and all that darkens and depraves the soul. For that was the mournful midnight of our mortal life, centuries ago. The old, sad stars that governed our conditions still kept their forceful station above the brawl of brutal and infernal dreams ; and one alone, new risen from Geber’s east, hung dewy bright with the world’s hope and promise, while Science, builder of life that is holy, beautiful, and gay, was but a wondrous new-born child in Roger Bacon’s cell, dreaming of things to come.

On the throne, meantime, was a crowned horse-leech, Henry the Third, familiarly called Harry of Winchester, — beggar and robber in one, the main thought of whose weak and base reign was how to drain by a million mean sluices the wealth of his subjects ; and in London, as in all England, taxmen, thieves, fogs, rain, heat, cold, miasma, lightning, fire, whirlwind, pestilence, riot, war, and famine performed their effects again on them through him. Under the feudal system, society and government cost dear: the rich, having much, paid immensely; the poor, having little, paid much ; the general wealth bled constantly at every vein ; and now, increasing the profuse depletion to unbearable extents, was this artery-draining king. At his marriage, his messengers swarmed out from his presence, through city, town, and country, and begged money ; at the birth of his son, out again, and begged money ; at New Year and other festival times, again, and begged money; on all possible occasions and upon any pretext, out they went, and begged money; and between whiles, among abbots, friars, clerks, tradesmen, and lower orders generally, Henry himself went, personally begging money. All along he was exacting heavy toll from the poor fishers of the coasts for every seine they dragged to land ; sending his justices out upon their circuits to collect for him immense sums by compounding offenses with rogues; confiscating the wealth of men who had chanced to encroach upon his forest borders; borrowing large amounts from cities and towns, and never returning them; plundering without mercy the rich Jews, whom everybody plundered, and even selling them outright to the king of the Romans, when he was in want of a wealthy Israelite to rob. On one occasion, when the abbots of the downs were not willing to ruin themselves by giving him a year’s value of their wool, he ruined them by forbidding its exportation; more than once he shut up the shops and stopped the entire traffic of towns and cities, to force the traders to sell their goods only at the fairs he instituted, where, for that privilege, they must pay him large duties ; on flimsy allegations or for slight faults he drew heavy fines from citizens, and even sent his bailiffs to pounce upon shops, and seize clothes, food, and wine for his household. Such were the devices by which he increased his own lawful annual revenue of forty thousand pounds sterling, all which he lavished in luxurious uses or on his host of idle courtiers, many of them foreigners from Poitou and Picardy, whom the people hated. In these beggaries and burglaries he was encouraged by his equally rapacious wife, Queen Eleanor ; and not only encouraged, but assisted, by the papal harpy of that period, Innocent the Fourth, who, besides filling all vacant English benefices with profligate Italian priests and even boys, abstracted every few years, by way of tithes, about a million pounds sterling.

London, especially, then the great commercial port of the realm, and rich despite its coarse and meagre life and squalid aspect, was the prime object of the king’s extortions. An inexhaustible well of riches he called it, and into that well, as an historian has said, he dipped his bucket freely. The consequence was that between him and the twenty thousand sturdy and turbulent little citizens there were deadly rancor and perpetual feud; for his operations were not only essentially outrageous, but in flagrant violation of the rights and liberties secured the citizens in the Great Charter which the barons and clergy had wrung from the preceding tyrant, John, at Runnymede. The great mass of the English people shared the exasperation of the London burgesses. Even the villans, or chattel slaves, — and a large portion of the people were in that condition, — themselves grievous sufferers by their own lords, had their little scrap of protection from the Charter, and were concerned at its violation. Against the king, too, was a large proportion of the barons and clergy of this reign, men who smarted pecuniarily by the frequent miseries his perpetual interference with trade and agriculture brought upon the realm, and whose chartered rights and privileges were often directly or indirectly invaded or nullified by his rapacity and prodigality. These, having stormed at the monarch year after year in vain, were now proceeding to serious action.

Foremost among them was one great statesman, — he who claims, by the common judgment of the time, the proud distinction the Norman song of that period accords him of being just for the pure love of justice,—Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester, brother-in-law to the king, and a Frenchman born and bred, but English heart-of-oak to his soul’s core, and the darling of the English people. Already the popular mind, naming him the gift of the Lord to England, had fixed upon him as the champion of the people’s cause; and already, at his instance, the barons and clergy in Parliament at Oxford had revived a provision of the Charter of Runnymede, by which the direction of affairs was taken from the exclusive hand of the king, and entrusted to a Committee of Government, twelve being appointed by the monarch, twelve by the Parliament. But the measure was only a partial check to the royal horse-leech. The abuses, somewhat diminished, still continued, and still against the king and his creatures the anger of London and of England was swelling and roaring, higher and louder, year by year, on and on, to the tornado fury of civil war.

In these times and in that old London, a street such as we have described, known as Friar’s Street, and inhabited chiefly by sailors, foreign traders whose business kept them much of the time on the wide waters, fishermen, and the like, stretched its irregular perspective parallel with and not far from the Thames. The time was toward the latter part of July. A brief though violent thunderstorm which had raged over the city was passing away ; but still, though the rain had ceased more than an hour before, wild piles of dark and coppery clouds, in which a fierce and rayless glow was laboring, gigantically overhung the grotesque and huddled vista of dwarf houses, while in the distance, sheeting high over the low, misty confusion of gables and chimneys, spread a pall of dead, leprous blue, suffused with blotches of dull, glistening yellow, and with black plague-spots of vapor floating and faint lightnings crinkling on its surface. Thunder, still muttering in the close and sultry air, kept the scared dwellers in the street within, behind their closed shutters ; and all deserted, cowed, dejected, squalid, like poor, stupid, top-heavy things that had felt the wrath of the summer tempest, stood the drenched structures on either side of the narrow and crooked way, ghastly and picturesque under the giant canopy. Rain dripped wretchedly in slow drops of melancholy sound from their projecting eaves upon the broken flagging, lay there in pools or trickled into the swollen drains, where the fallen torrent sullenly gurgled on its way to the river. In the centre of the fetid street—a deep and serpentine canal of mud, undulating here and there into little lakes of standing water, overstrewn in places with ash-heaps, scattered shards and fishbones, and dully glistering in the swarthy light from the clouds — seven or eight unwieldy swine, belonging to St. Antony’s Hospital, whose pigs alone were privileged, out of regard for the saint, to roam the city, waddled and rooted lazily, with their neck-bells continually jingling. Other sounds and forms than these there were none.

A little while, however, and, the beldam thunder having died away into faint and distant guttural mumblings, shutters began to uplift and doors to open, one by one; and in the same order shabby figures in vivid dresses of blue, red, yellow, or striped stuffs, mostly of housewives, with here and there a man among them in short tunic and hose of the same colors, appeared at the apertures, peering timorously at the wild sky and then at the street below. Gradually the clacking and clattering of opening doors and shutters became general; the figures multiplied rapidly ; children of all sizes, in bright-hued smocks, shock-headed and barelegged, began to swarm down the stairways and out upon the flagging; and the street echoed with a clamor of voices, speaking and replying from all quarters.

While this neighborly hubbub was going on, there was a sudden lurid brightening of the swarthy light from the clouds; and at the same moment, as if the effect had wrought the change, voices were shrilling, people down the street gesticulating and running, a movement like an electric shock shot along, and at once, inexplicably, amidst an inarticulate roaring murmur like a coming sea, all voices were raised in screaming tumultuation, and everybody flew hither and thither in confusion. St. Antony’s swine, confounded by this explosion, stopped rooting, and stood belly-deep in mud, ears laid forward and every snout pointed down the street, into which, from a side avenue, a multitude, mostly of women, were now irregularly pouring, hardly turning their faces from the direction in which they had come to glance at the mire, through which they scrambled, with upheld skirts, up to the opposite flagging, and never ceasing to hoot and gesticulate at something as yet invisible. The next moment came a straggle of boys, furiously yelling and flinging handfuls of mud ; and then bursting through them came three young men, courtiers at the first glance, with the many-hued flowerage of their short gowns and the gay colors of their silken hoods and hose and mantles almost obscured with the mire which covered them from head to foot. With flushed and frightened dirthespattered faces, they sprang upon the footway with brandished poniards, and ran desperately up the street amidst a deafening din. Away cluttered the swine before them, squealing and jingling, and then turning, as pigs will, just the way they should not have turned, floundered into the crowd of following boys and on to the pavement; upsetting boys, girls, men, and women in all directions, and increasing the general rage and confusion. For a moment, involved in this new imbroglio, two prentices, — one a lank fellow in belted russet tunic, the other short and fat in blue, — who had burst around the corner with cudgels, close upon the heels of the flying courtiers, lost sight of them, but, presently emerging into clearer space, saw them again as they raced over the flagging.

“ Run, Little Turstan ! Hep ! hep ! ” shouted the lank one, setting off in pursuit.

“ Hep ! hep ! ” panted Little Turstan, putting his bandy legs into comically active motion again.

But the three courtiers were already some distance off, and after a short run the two prentices stopped, and gazed, panting and gasping, with drooping cudgels, after their lost prey. Both of them were small in stature, as the men of that day mostly were, and beardless ; both had the yellow locks and pig faces of the Saxon; and the lank one had run himself white, while his fat companion was blowzed fiery-red with his exertions, and purblind into the bargain.

For a half minute or so they stood, the first absorbed in his hungry outlook, the other looking also, but with the air of one too hot and breathless to see anything clearly, or to care about seeing it, and both regardless of the tumult they had left behind them. Suddenly the lank fellow wheeled about, bringing his cudgel down thump upon the stones, and, throwing back his head, opened his big mouth wide for the purpose of belching forth some tremendous imprecation; in which attitude he remained, like one unexpectedly petrified, staring straight before him. Just then, from the side avenue below, the street filled with perhaps a hundred figures, prentices and courtiers, intermingled in a stabbing and striking snarl, their shouts and oaths sounding amidst a Babel clamor of hooting and screaming from the excited concourse on the footways. But the staring prentice was apparently oblivious of the spectacle, and Little Turstan, who had followed his motion to this strange conclusion, looked up at him with hot, bleared eyes in stupid wonderment.

“ Hey, Wynkin, what now ? ” he gasped, panting and blowing.

Without closing his mouth, Wynkin rolled his eyes down sideways upon the face upturned to his, and, with a vacant and dazed air, made a slow motion with his thumb. Quite as slowly Little Turstan turned his eyes in the direction indicated, and saw, not far from them, a strong, columnar figure in red hose and gray mantle, standing on the flagging in the attitude of one who had paused in coming up the street to look back upon the brawl, with his face concealed by the mantle’s hood, the edges of which he held together with one hand. Little Turstan gaped at him for a minute ; then, not knowing what else to do, grasped his cudgel, and looked at Wynkin as asking whether the stranger was to be set upon.

“ I spied his face,” murmured Wynkin wonderingly.

“ Whose, then ? ” demanded his companion.

“Whose think you, now?”

“ Nay, but that I do not know, Wynkin.”

“As I am a living man, Turstan ” — asseverated Wynkin, turning to his comrade with an eager and mysterious air, and speaking in a low voice.

“ Ay ” —

“ By Becket, may I never see grace if it was not ” —

“ Who ? ”

Wynkin’s eyes sparkled, and, with an air at once consequential, patronizing, important, and reverential, he put one hand over his mouth and bent his face down to Little Turstan’s ear.

“ Sir Simon the Righteous ! ” he pompously murmured, straightening with an air of triumph the moment he had spoken. The one quick thing about Little Turstan was instinct, and instinctively, upon hearing the name which the popular love had bestowed upon the great earl, he put up his hand to remove his cap, but found that, like his companion, he was bareheaded. The object of this reverential movement had evidently heard Wynkin’s answer, though the prentice had spoken in a low voice, for he started slightly, and drew his hood closer together.

“Whist, — mum, Little Turstan,” whispered Wynkin ; “ affect not to know him, for he would not be here with hooded face, and never a follower at his back, if he wished not to be secret. Whist, now, he comes.”

As he said the last words the personage advanced, with his veiled face turned toward the comrades, who at once louted low.

“ What means yon brawl, good fellows ? ” asked he, in a grave, sonorous voice, whose French accent confirmed the assertion Wynkin’s glimpse of his features had prompted.

Little Turstan sheepishly shambled behind his comrade, but the latter, though a little startled at becoming suddenly aware that the fight in which he had been engaged some distance off but just before was transferred now to the street in which he stood, bent humbly to the stately figure before him, and answered at once like a fellow who had his wits about him.

“ They be the king’s men, most worshipful.” he said. “ May it please you, most worshipful, yon masters, to the number of some forty or so, did take their pleasure in our streets, and lest their silken gear be wet in the storm they sought their refuge in the shops. So till the foul weather overpassed, when, lo and behold you. most worshipful, up spake one of nine to Little Turstan here, saying, ‘ Scurvy wretch, our liege king would have pipkins of the potter,’ — he being the potter’s prentice, most worshipful, and the potter away from home.

‘ Pipkins he shall have if he pay ; not else,’ quoth Little Turstan. ‘ Here be the pay, scurvy wretch,’ quoth the king’s man, and throws one pipkin at Little Turstan, and yet another at his fellowprentice, Thomas. ‘ Ye do ill, masters, to break the potter’s ware,’ quoth Little Turstan. ‘ We do well, soapy and scurvy wretch,’ quoth the king’s man. Whereat the nine lay hands on the large table whereon are many pipkins, the which they overturn, and all the pipkins are broken. Then stoutly cries Little Turstan, ‘ Prentice, prentice ! ’ and to the shop enter the other king’s men, and break pipkins, and go out down Lombard Street merrily laughing. After them sally our prentices, most worshipful, and say, ‘ Ye shall go with us and answer for the wrong ye have wrought.’ To which the king’s men say, ‘ Ye are all scurvy and soapy wretches, and we will not go with ye, nor yet answer.’ So drawing their gully-knives upon us, we set upon them with our staves; and three among those nine running from the rest, Little Turstan and I give chase, till we lose them in Friar’s Street, where the others now are, as I see, most worshipful.”

To this narrative of what had happened (of which our version must be considered a sort of translation, for Wynkin spoke in the uncouth AngloSaxon of the period, a language wholly unintelligible to us now, and such as we might fancy a horse would naturally speak, could he speak at all) the stranger listened in perfect silence, though it was easy to see, by the nervous griping of the hand holding the hood together, that he fully understood and was moved by the story of one of those outrages frequently committed in that day by the king’s creatures, and the common end of which was a heavy fine levied upon the citizens. Whether he would have made any reply is doubtful, but if he intended any it was cut short by a nudge Little Turstan gave Wynkin from behind, which, with the uneasy glance accompanying it, caused the latter to take notice of the spot where they happened to be standing. It was in front of a structure of stone, not very high, but considerably higher than the other edifices ; withdrawn somewhat from the zigzag line of the street ; dusky brown in color, and showing by the smoky stains and scars upon it that it had been scathed by, and probably proved a barrier to, some of those conflagrations which so often then ravaged London; its narrow windows closely shuttered ; a loophole in the form of a cross between the two in the upper story ; a sombre portal jutting beneath, with a carven finial, and on its cornice floral carvings ; within this an oaken door heavily clamped with iron ; on either side of the portal, set in niches, two wooden effigies of St. Francis d’Assisi and St. Thomas à Becket ; and weeds and grass raggedly fringing the overhanging eaves, growing thickly around the broken steps and spiring from their seams and fissures. Sooth to say it was a building before which nobody, from the child at his games to the very oldest citizen, cared even in broad daylight to linger; though people did venture to live, and even to frequent the flagging, on the opposite side. The explanation of this popular timidity was, that in the stone house abode then, as for a year past, a learned man ; and a learned man at that delightful period was regarded by the populace with reverential horror, as one who was unquestionably a master of black arts and a dealer with the devil. When, therefore, Wynkin became aware that he was in front of the house, he turned a shade paler and devoutly crossed himself, as Little Turstan had already done. No sooner had both prentices caught sight of a pale and bearded face calmly looking from a half-opened shutter above upon the fray — the face of the learned man himself — than they both crossed themselves again, and involuntarily made a movement to depart. Instantly the hooded personage passed by them with a slight bend of his head, the face at the window above disappearing at the same time, and the two prentices hurried off, and were presently striking and shouting in the midst of the brawl.

In front of the portal the personage paused to look back. As he turned, out smote from the clouds a burst of sunshine, blinding bright. The white walls and wet red roofs suddenly a-smoke with rising vapor ; the chimneys, jutting fronts and eaves, propped shutters, stairways, all salient points and surfaces, streaked, splashed, and fringed with the sombre silver and sullen jewels of the rain ; the street’s black-shining slush, the flagging’s leaden pools; the many - colored multitude swaying and tossing in one wild, howling bray of discord beyond; the motley mire-bedraggled fighters reeling and plunging, with flailing of cudgels and flashing of poniards, like a cluster of dwarf devils in interstruggling confusion, — the whole long low, stormy vista, dashed with a thousand rough lights and sooty shadows, and showing like some gorgeous and demoniac phantasmagoria, swept up to meet the eye of the gazer. All was distinct in flame and gloom, under the lowering and tremendous rack, whose yellow and umber masses, riven into terrific forms, toiled gigantically to the far limit, where, losing shape, they sheeted down the vault through intermediate gray in dense and livid blue. A new life seemed to strike into the multitude with that abrupt and stern illumination ; the whole concourse wavered convulsively, with brandished arms and hoarse and furious cries; the struggling mass of fighters plunged heavily forward, all together, swayed back again, and fought with frantic yells. Then came a chorus of shrill screams; there was a sudden scattering ; the vivid light went out, obscured in blotting clouds ; and in the pallid shadow which struck the street blank and ghast the dispersing crowd was seen running in affrighted silence, the people scrambling up stairways and in at doors, the prentices darting into the spaces between the houses, while through the multitudinous muffled clatter of footfalls sounded the dull and heavy gallop of approaching horse ; and as the city guard came riding in, there were visible only twos and threes of miry prentices in different directions, vanishing into the interspaces with wounded comrades between them, and some distance down the street a draggled group of courtiers hastily retreating, with sore bones, toward Westminster.

“ God’s curse on king and king’s men ! ” said the hooded witness of the scene, stamping his foot passionately on the flagging. He said no more, but, hastily entering the portal, struck twice on the oaken door. After a pause, the door swung slowly back a little way on its creaking hinges, and revealed in the shadowy aperture a dwarfish and hideously misshapen figure, clad in red, with a stolid and sodden face and a shock of yellow hair.

“ Make way, good Cuthbert Hoole,” said the visitor kindly. “ I would see the friar.”

Cuthbert Hoole kept his bloodshot eyes, almost vacant of intelligence, fixed for a moment on the speaker’s face, and then, in a feeble and dissonant tone, whined slowly : — “ Time is ! Come.”

Like one accustomed to the strange manner of the poor idiot, the visitor entered, and, following with calm strides the darting and zigzag course of his usher, was conducted through an obscure, low-browed passage to a small and lofty oaken chamber, palely lighted by a narrow oriel window with glass panes, set rather high in the wall. It was furnished with two huge wooden chairs, a settle, and a massive table, on which were a book of vellum, an inkhorn, and a few rolls of parchment. A spare and slender figure, gowned in gray Franciscan frieze, with the cowl laid back on his shoulders, stood near the table, and turned toward the visitor, as he entered, a face of scholastic pallor, meagre and noble, its lower part covered with a close-curling auburn beard, and its thin, clear features wearing in their shadow a faint smile which shed a pale irradiation under the hollow arches of the eyes, and over the unwrinkled marble of a forehead grand and large in its proportions, from which time and thought had worn away the monastic tonsure.

“ Welcome, my lord of Leicester,”said he, bending his head slightly.

“ Thanks, marvelous doctor, I greet you,” replied the earl. “ But no court fashions of speech with me. By God’s eyes, I weary alike of court and court fashions ! ”

He strode forward as he spoke, his presence seeming to flood the cloistral tranquillity of the chamber with a sense of embattled armies, and, throwing himself into a chair, flung back his hood. A kingly fronted presence, making the seat he sat upon a throne ; the face bronzed and martial, stern, sagacious, royal with justice, passionate and warsad ; the large head, broad at the top, and covered with curling locks of irongray, rising grandly from the solid shoulders ; the bold forehead corrugated ; the brown eyes filled with a clear fire under their pented brows, though veiled with a certain weariness as they wandered listlessly over the manuscripts on the table ; the nose large, aquiline, courageous, with dilated nostrils ; and the heavy black mustache of the Norman sloping down to the resolute jaw. Over the whole countenance now was an expression of vexed gloom. The friar. smiled pensively as he gazed upon it.

“You are fretted, De Montfort,” he said.

“ Fretted ! ” replied the earl, smiting his breast with his clenched hand. “ Ay, Roger, fretted. Splendor of God, well may I be fretted ! To be rid of this cark and care of state, I could become a shepherd of the downs.”

“ Then would you be fretted with the shepherd’s cark and care,” returned the friar jestingly.

The earl looked grim for a moment, but, soothed by the sweet, clear voice, like the falling of silver waters, as by the strengthful calm of the friar’s presence, he smiled slowly, and then laughed.

“True, marvelous doctor, true,” he said carelessly, his front relaxing. “ All estates must have their crosses. Even you, Roger, with your worn face of peace, have borne burdens.”

“ Yes, ” said the friar simply, after a pause, “ I have suffered.”

De Montfort s mind, already roving from the thoughts that disturbed him, at once lost sight of them ; his careless mood became fixed with sudden interest, and his eyes shot a keen glance at the musing face of the speaker, then wandered to the book on the table, and returned.

“ I understand,” he said slowly, moving his head up and down with the air of one occupied with a reflection which had never struck him before. “ Yes, I have heard that Roger Bacon seeks too devoutly the mysteries of God to be loved by man. But why seek science at such cost ? ”

“ Science is for man’s advantage,” replied Bacon gravely.

“For man’s advantage? True, but it brings you sorrow, Roger.”

“ And you, De Montfort, — why toil you for justice against court and king and factious peers ? ”

“ It is for England’s welfare.”

“ But it brings you gall and grief, De Montfort.”

“ God’s throat, yes! ” the earl wrathfully assented, striking the arm of his chair. “ Gall and grief it brings me, truly ! Yet better gall and grief to me than ruin to the realm ; better anything than shameful sloth of mine when wrongs cry for man to right them.”

“ Amen, brave earl! You have answered for me.”

De Montfort looked mutely at him for a moment, and, with curious wish to know if such were indeed the motive of the great friar, spoke on.

“ Yet hear me, Roger,” he said, “ and mark the difference between us twain. Behold, I have many recompenses. I am Earl of Leicester. From Kenilworth I look on broad lands of mine own. I have my good dame, the Lady Eleanor, and my stout sons. And what though royal Harry rage, and William de Valence scowl, and Gloucester’s faction chafe me ? Good prelates bless me ; bold barons are leal to me, and hail me champion and leader. Ay, more, — the people love me. They call me the Mattathias of the suffering land. They call me Sir Simon the Righteous. Is it not worth sorrow to have won such names as these ? Sweet is the love of the people, Roger! But you,” he pursued, his voice sinking from its proud tone to one of frank compassion, — “ what are your recompenses ? You are not now, as once, the glory of the university. Your voice is silenced there. You have no longer wealth. It has been spent for science. The friars of your order vent their malice and envy in the foulest calumnies upon you. The people do not love, but dread you. You are unblessed, unhonored, landless, wifeless, childless, almost friendless. Often in past time, as I have heard, your studies have been forbidden, your books and writings nailed together ; you have been denied company, scanted of food and drink, imprisoned. To what good end ? Why forego ease, joy, honor, for this ? Why toil for science when it brings you naught but hate, slander, ill fame, oppression, poverty, hunger, imprisonment, perchance death ? ”

The friar raised his noble head, with a rapt light upon his wasted features.

“ It is for the advantage of the world,” he said, with sublime simplicity.

De Montfort looked at him with parted lips, and a red flush crept over his massive countenance.

“ The advantage of the world ! ” he rejoined, abstractedly and slowly. “That is a sorry voice to give a man cheer and comfort when all human voices cry against him.”

“ It is the voice divine,” returned the friar, “ and it never leaves me. I hear it,” he said, with dreamful and solemn ardor, “ when all human voices cry against me, — voice of their voices, and of their tones the overtone. Day never rose nor set, night never came nor silence never folded me, in which it was not Heaven’s own voice of comfort to my spirit. Yea, jailed in my cell, wasted with prison rigors, when angry faces gnash at me, when cruel tongues rail at me, I hear it still, blithe and strong as battle trumpets, and bracing my heart to bear whatever man hath borne. Blithe and strong as in the early days at Ilchester, when it bade me yield up the lily and the rose of youth, the honors and the ease of age, so blithe and strong and filled with cheer and comfort do I hear it now. So shall I hear it, all sufficient, to my latest day; so shall I hear it on my dying pallet as I go to Him who also strove for the world’s advantage, following whom I have labored to raise man’s life to the perfection of the Christian law, in something of whose spirit I have humbly striven to live, and somewhat of whose crown of thorns I have been graciously permitted to wear.”

Ceasing, he stood with solemn light upon his face, and silence such as follows religious music succeeded to his voice when its last rapt cadences had died away. The flush had paled from De Montfort’s features, and mutely for a little while, with the fire of his brown eyes dim, he gazed at the friar.

“ O life of God,” he passionately murmured. “ who would not be noble in England with such a man as this alive ! ”

“What say you, DeMontfort ? ” abstractedly asked Bacon, hearing his murmurings.

“ Roger,” replied the earl, “ I see what sustains you in your lonely toil for the truths of God, and I grant all labor and sorrow for the world’s advantage well, for the advantage is the noble laborer’s sufficient recompense. But hear me. Robert Grostete has long foretold that I should fall in the cause of truth and justice, this strife for the Charter, and I feel that the good bishop has spoken truly. Yet my life will not have been in vain, and my death will establish all for which I have striven. But whatever benefit men are to receive from you rests on the preservation of your writings, and these many are leagued to destroy. Failing this fate, they may moulder to dust, unseen by men, in Oxford library. So will your life have been wasted. What sustains you against the bitter likelihood that the world will receive no advantage from you, owing to the neglect or destruction of your manuscripts ? ”

The friar looked at him with a mien of unfaltering majesty.

“ Their own worth will preserve them,” he answered, with proud humility, “ if God means that they shall be preserved.”

He turned away, but the reply struck the red flush again to the convulsed features of De Montfort, and drove the bright tears to his eyes.

“ I am answered,” he said hoarsely. “ Well am I answered. But, by the soul of the Lord, I love England less at this moment that she loves not Roger Bacon more! ”

There were a few minutes of silence. The friar lapsed into reverie. The earl, subduing his emotion, sat mournfully revolving many thoughts, and gradually passing away through busy mental transitions from the things that had been spoken.

“ Well, well,” he said abruptly, with a sad, ruminating smile, “ I know not why one should despond. The times are stormy, yet they mend, they mend. Certes, Roger, they are better than when your little jest so deftly tilted over that varlet Peter de Rupibus.”

“ My little jest? What mean you, De Montfort ? ” said the friar absently.

“ I mean petræ et rupes, which signifies stones and rocks, does it not ? ” returned the earl, with a quiet laugh.

“ Such is the meaning,” replied the friar, still absently, with the air of one whose thoughts were wandering from the colloquy. “ But I do not understand.”

“ What, forget your good wit! ” gayly exclaimed De Montfort. “ But you forget not Peter de Rupibus, that knavish Bishop of Winchester ? ”

“ Nay, I remember him well,” said Bacon mechanically.

“ And well you may,” continued De Montfort. “ Our royal Harry’s prime minister more than twenty years agone ; he at whose beck England was filled with the rufflers of Poitou, without an encompassing crowd of whom the king would go nowhere ; he who ruled the land at his own free pleasure, and so inflamed the king’s heart with hatred of his English subjects that his sole thought was how to exterminate them all. Doubtless he meant to do as much for his barons, by aid of the swords of Poitou, when he summoned us to the conference, to which we were too wise to come, and left him to sit there with the clergy. You were a clerk of that conference, Roger.”

“Yes, yes.”said the friar, smiling. “ I remember it all now, though it had passed my memory.”

“ Ay,” continued De Montfort laughingly, “ and the king was furious that day, as I have often been told, and brawled lustily at his absent barons, till up spake a young frère of your order, a large and portly man, Thomas Bungy by name. You know him well, I doubt not, Roger ? ”

“ Yes,” said Bacon, reddening.

“ A good patriot,” continued De Montfort, not noticing the friar’s flush. “ Up spake he, and stoutly told the king he would know no peace till he had dismissed Peter de Rupibus. Whereat the king stormed, but the conference declared Frère Bungy’s words true, and he grew more reasonable. Then was heard the pleasant voice of Roger Bacon saying, ‘ Lord king, we sail the ship of England; tell me, lord king, what frightens sailors most, and what is their greatest danger ? ’ ‘ Sailors know best,’ quoth sullen Harry. ‘ My lord, I will tell you,’ replied Roger : ‘ it is petræ et rupes.’ Whereat king and conference roared laughter from their beards.”

“ That was a hint in Latin,” said Bacon, coloring again and smiling.

“ Truly,” returned De Montfort, with a mirthful face, “ and it hinted Peter out of England, I verily believe. ‘ Ha, haw, ho! ’ roared Bungy, in huge jollity. ‘ Petræ et rupes sounds much like Peter de Rupibus, liege king ! ’ ‘ Ay,’ quoth my good Bishop of Lincoln, ‘and certes is Peter stones and rocks to us who sail the ship of England.’ Ah, well, ’t was a little thing, but it softened the king’s heart, as good wit in a pleasant voice often does, and left him in easy mood to yield Peter’s dismissal at the solicitations of the primate. So the gale of merriment that jest raised blew the minister out of England, and the rogues of Poitou along with him.”

Do Montfort laughed heartily, while the friar smiled as faintly as might a modern reader of his mediæval joke, coming upon Matthew Paris’s version of it in the chronicle of Roger de Wendover.

“ If jests could blow Peters and Poictevins from England,” Bacon said presently, " I would fain fall a-jesting now.”

“ True,” returned the earl; “ there are still many foreigners at court and in places of power, though not in such number now as ” —

“ Nay, I refer not to the presence of the men of Poitou,” interrupted the friar, “ nor yet to the Italians whom Pope Guilty thrusts upon us, but to” — A sudden peal of hilarity from De Montfort checked his speech.

“ Pope Guilty! ” ejaculated the mirthful earl. “ Innocent the Fourth rechristened ! Pope Guilty! Roger, Roger, while your wit thus brands evil dignities there are other reasons, I trow, for denying you speech and visitors, and nailing your books together, than your simple zeal for the truth of God.”

“ ’T is a truth of God thus to name the Pope,” said the friar, with a soft laugh. “ For the rest, De Montfort, I misdoubt me but you say true. It was on my lips to refer to the day’s riot.”

“Ay,” thunderously muttered De Montfort, his brow darkening. “ It had passed my mind. Know you its cause ? ”

“ I heard that shrill-voiced prentice tell you, as I stood at the window,” replied Bacon. “ A matter of broken pipkins.”

“ Broken pipkins ! ” cried De Montfort stormfully. “ Broken liberties, I say! When the idle varlets of a king have power so to deal in a tradesman’s shop, what is broken beside his earthenware ? God’s life, the charter of a nation ! ”

“ Even so,” returned the friar. “ But was it this that so fretted you, De Montfort ? ”

“Only in part,” moodily replied the earl, champing his mustache as a warhorse champs his curb, while the rage of eye and nostril slowly settled into gloom. “ Hear me, Roger,” he continued, after a pause. “ I will tell you. My royal brother-in-law was taking pleasure in his barge on the river, when the storm came on, and caused him to land at the nearest mansion, which happened to be Durham House, where I then was. The rain had ceased, however, ere he landed. When I came down with my lord the bishop into the garden to greet him, he fell a-trembling, and grew as white as though I were a spectre. ‘ My liege,’ I said, ‘ why are you afraid? The tempest is now past.’ He looked at me with lowering aspect. ‘ I fear thunder and lightning beyond measure,’ said he in a hollow voice, ‘ but, by the head of God, I do more fear thee than all the thunder and lightning in the world ! ’ Ay, Roger, thus spake he. And he did thee me ! In the very presence of his malapert courtier crew he did thee me! By St. Michael, but that he was the king I could have struck him dead ! ”

“ How answered you ? ” asked Bacon, his eyes grown bright and keen, and fixed eagerly upon the earl.

“ My passion made me calm,” replied De Montfort, “ and England rose in my heart to answer him. ‘Fear not me, my liege,’ I said, with my eyes bent upon the scowling crew, — ‘ fear not me, who have been always loyal to you and your realm. Fear rather your true enemies, who destroy the realm and abuse you with bad counsels.’ At which the brazen caitiffs slunk cowering, and followed Harry of Winchester, who went by without another word.”

“ Was this all ? ”

“ All,” was the reply. “ I entered my barge at the foot of the garden, and came hither, — came hither to see, as I passed, the result of just men’s blood and grief once again made as naught; wasters of poor men’s goods answering with steel instead of silver for their ravages, and holding the city’s peace and laws as cobwebs, as they have done time and again. God grant they were well cudgeled, though every blow they got is like to cost the city a pot of money. But it shall not. Despardieux ! If the king moves to fine the citizens for this outrage of his minions, I will bring it before the council.”

“ Think not of it, De Montfort,” said the friar calmly. “ Let the fine follow the wrong, as it doubtless will. Think rather how to limit this king’s power for wrong.”

“That were good thinking,” replied De Montfort, with a gloomy smile. “ But how ? This year’s Parliament has brought forth my best thought, the Committee of Government. To what avail ? How check these royal evils, which creep like grass and wind like water everywhere ? ”

“ Hearken, De Montfort,” said the friar. " Time was when Norman scorn could say, ‘ Dost take me for an Englishman ? ’ ”

Time is passed,” whined a voice. De Montfort turned quickly round in his chair, and saw Cuthbert Hoole retreating from the closing door, motioned away by the friar.

“ He is weak-witted,” said the latter, “ and this is part of his poor jargon; but he spoke aptly then. Time is, indeed, passed. The Norman owns himself Englishman. Saxon and Norman no longer, we are all Englishmen. The old disdain lives only in the court of the king.”

“ Where it keeps the land in constant broil,” said the earl.

“ Ay, but you can crush it there,” said Bacon. “ You can array a power against it so formidable that it must bow. Nor can Gloucester’s faction maintain it.”

“ And how ? ”

“ Hearken,” pursued the friar. “ Statecraft has found that the law of the realm, and not the will of the king, must rule England. Said I not that we are all Englishmen now ? Let statecraft, then, find that the law which rules must be made by Englishmen; not by English lords and priests for the people, but by the English people for the people. Poorly will they defend the law made for them; stoutly will they defend the law themselves have made.”

“ Dost meditate a Parliament of villans, Roger ? ” bantered the earl.

A deeper pallor overspread the visage of the friar, and upon it stole a smile like dawn.

“ I see a time far off.” he reverently answered, “ when the charters which barons win and cannot keep shall be kept securely by those who shall be villans then no more. Far off I see it coming on its way. So let it come, with all good things, hereafter.” He moved up the chamber, with his head bent upon His hand, and, wheeling suddenly, faced the earl. “ De Montfort, ” he cried, with startling energy, “ what, is it the king fears more in you than the thunder and the lightning ? It is that more fearful to the tyrant than the thunder and the lightning, — a brave man’s justice. Gift of the Lord to England, a new power calls to your justice for its place in the councils of the nation ! ”

“ What power ? ” De Montfort eagerly demanded.

“ What power studs England with so many free cities and boroughs ? Lord earl, they were not built by peers and prelates. Lord earl, the men I speak of hold not by tenure of the villan, nor wear the collar of the slave. Rich and strong with trade and labor, and freemen all, why stand they unrepresented in the politics of England ? ”

“ What would you have me do ? ” said the startled earl.

“ Repay the love that loves you. Summon the burgesses to Parliament. Give them equal place with peers and prelates in the councils of the realm. So, with something like the nation at your back, you can front the faction of the Crown.”

The bold reply smote like light on the brain of De Montfort. Instantly he saw the advantage such a move would give him, and a latent thought of his own rose in his mind, one with the thought of the friar. Speechless, with the red flush on his corrugated brow, his features puckered with wonder, and a fire-flash in his eyes, he sat upright, staring at Bacon. Then, smiting the arms of his chair, he threw back his head, and his laugh rang wild and weird.

“ Behold,” he said, “ often as I have mused upon these burgesses, a thought I could not define, like a man masked and cloaked, has come to me. Now, at your words, mask and cloak drop, and your thought I recognize as mine. Powers of heaven, what a measure! But, Roger, ’t would be hard to compass.”

“First of all,” urged Bacon, “seek out Bracton, and get him to look if there be not some precedents for it.”

“ Ay, well counseled. But hush. Let me think of this, for my mind is all a-whirl.”

Bacon turned away, and for five minutes the earl sat in silence, his eyes covered with his hand, absorbed in reflection.

“ Robert Grostete’s prophecy is like to come true or this,” he said at last, in a sombre voice. “ Fruitful of much fair fortune would this measure be to England, but woful would it prove to me. It cannot be compassed without collision with the king. Yet what matter ! Roger, I will take it into mind, — ay, more: by God’s eyes, it shall be accomplished, if it can be ! Let the worst come. It is right, it is just. All that I have and am is for right and justice. Oh, happy he who soldiers the good cause ! Oh, happy, happy he who can die for it! ”

The great earl well redeemed his passionate pledge, as history attests, nor was his foreboding groundless. A few years later, and the measure which laid the foundation of the English House of Commons, and called the great body of the English people into political life, was fully inaugurated, and a new morning rose upon the nation, though with a blood-red dawn.

“ Hearken, De Montfort,” said Bacon, drawing near him. “ Dismiss from your mind all thought of collision with the king. That were ruin. This must be done in the king’s name, and it is now your task to win him to your design. I will show you many arguments and methods by which he may be won. Patience, patience. Take time. The years are before you.”

“ Roger,” said the earl abruptly, “ I came here to-day to ask you a question. At my last visit you said something — I know not how, nor exactly what — ’t was a dark saying — spoken in jest, too — but it has haunted me ever since — something about enwalling England against invasion. What meant you, — anything or nothing ? Dost apprehend invasion ? ”

Bacon colored deeply under the frank, inquisitive gaze of the speaker.

“ It might be,” he said, in an evasive tone. “ France may at any time spread her banners in the land. Harry of Winchester may ally with Pope Guilty, a papal interdict again hurl Europe upon England as in William Conquestor’s time, and the realm see another Hastings.”

“ Alack ! ” sighed the earl, “ what wall against such invasion as this ? ”

“ A united realm,” replied Bacon quickly. “ Beware of division with Harry of Winchester. Be friends with him. Resent nothing. Beguile or persuade him into sanctioning all you do. De Montfort, make firm alliance with the king ! That is England’s wall against all invaders.”

“It is well counseled,” said the earl thoughtfully, with his eyes fixed upon the floor. “ But, Roger ” —

Looking up, he saw that the friar had drawn his cowl over his face. De Montfort instantly divined that he had a thought he feared his face might betray, and, laughing, he rose.

“ Nay, then,” said he gayly, “ if you cover your face, I go. But, Roger, thanks for your wise counsels. You have given me much to think of. Thanks, thanks, and for the present farewell.”

He clasped the thin hand of the friar in his own brown strong palm, gazed with frank tenderness a moment on the bent cowled head, then, drawing his hood over his face, left the room.

The friar stood motionless, listening to the receding steps of the earl along the passage. They ceased, the heavy door closed resounding, and with a sudden movement he threw back his cowl, and showed his face kindled in shadow, his eyes shining as with interior flame.

“ Ay, gift of the Lord to England,” he fervently murmured, clasping his hands, “ your union with this paltry king shall fortress England from without and from within as with a wall! God grant the android a good success, and he and you shall work in concert! ”

He sat down near the table, and, leaning his throbbing head upon his hands, lapsed into exulting reverie, while the sunlight, breaking again from the clouds, streamed aslant through the window, and lit the chamber with a shadowy splendor of triumphant gold.

A few minutes had passed slowly by in that rich gloom, when the friar was startled from his abstraction by the sudden appearance of Cuthbert Hoole. The idiot darted in, with a frightened glare in his bloodshot eyes, his usually sodden and immobile face distorted with wild excitement,screeched “Time was! ” and, spinning on his heel for an instant with dizzy rapidity, vanished through the open door, which closed behind him.

Bacon sprang upright, astounded, and stood holding his breath, with his heart beating and all his blood pricking and tingling, while the very air seemed struck dead around him, so intense was the silence. A moment, and the air crept, as it were, with a strange magnetic life, as, releasing his breath, he stepped quickly to the centre of the room, and again stood still.

“ Per os Dei,” he muttered, “this is strange ! Only once before have I known the boy to be thus affected, and that was when the Paduan was here, a year ago. ’T is the time, too, when, if he keeps his word, he must be again in England. Can he be near the house? Tush, no ! Yet ’t is singular, this mysterious sympathy between that profound and subtle Doctor Malatesti and my poor darkened Cuthbert Hoole. If indeed there be such a sympathy — Tush, tush ! I dream.”

At that moment loud blows were heard on the portal. The blood rushed with a shock to the friar’s heart. A long pause, and again the blows sounded loudly. Despite his self-control an icy chill coursed through his veins.

“ Can it be that the Paduan is here ? ” he muttered. “ Mayhap Cuthbert is afeard.”

He made a step forward to answer the summons himself, but his brain swam, and an inexplicable feeling, resembling fear, thrilled through him and made him stand. Again the blows thundered on the portal ; but suddenly he grew calm, for he heard the door open, and the thump of a lusty kick upon some human body coincident with the sturdy objurgation: —

“ St. Swithin plague thee, thou malformed bunch ! Must thou keep a frère of the Lord’s flock pounding till doomsday at the portal ? ”

Bacon smiled in despite of himself.

“ Oaf that I am ! ” he murmured. “ Maundering of the Paduan, when ’t is only my burly Bungy ! ”

The next instant Friar Bungy lumbered into the room with the gait of an overgrown elephant. He was a perfect abbey-lubber, enormously fat, nearly six feet in height, and with an incredible circumference of paunch. The rough cord which, after the fashion of the Franciscans, bound his gray habit around the waist would have sufficed for at least two ordinary brothers of the order. His merry black eyes twinkled under a low but prominent forehead with its tonsure band of gray hair, and lit his red blobber-cheeked visage, fringed with a grizzly gray beard, with the light of a certain gross genius. He was barefooted, and the heavy flap of his immense dirty feet sounded on the floor with a distinctness which testified to his ponderous weight, as he surged across the chamber, and flung himself, half reclining, upon the oaken settle, which creaked beneath his burden. As he lay thus, blowing obstreperously, with his mighty stomach stupendously rising and falling, he afforded a striking contrast to the spare and graceful ascetic figure of Roger Bacon, who stood, calm as a statue, surveying him with a slight smile on his austere features.

“Oh, Brother Roger,” panted the exhausted Bungy in a stentorian voice, “ I am well-nigh dead with the speed of my course, and truly am frying in my frock with the sore heat of the day ! ”

“ Nay, Frère Thomas,” said Bacon, “ you were quick enough to abuse Cuthbert with a most heavy buffet, as you came in. Surely it would better beseem you to deal gently with our poor witless servitor.”

The fat friar suspended the operation of wiping with the sleeve of his habit the perspiration from his flushed face, and burst into a jovial laugh, which spread his large mouth from ear to ear, and showed a shining double row of splendid teeth in the boskage of his gray beard.

“ Peace, Roger ! ” he roared, subsiding. “ I did slight harm to Cuthbert, but the unready carl was slow to answer my summons, and I was vexed. Make him fetch me a stoup of water, I beseech you, or, by St. Thomas à Becket, I shall die of drouth.”

Bacon took from a shelf a wooden tankard, but finding it empty left the room to replenish it. No sooner was he gone than the fat friar lifted himself from the settle with a rapidity which denoted no extreme state of exhaustion, and whipping out a large flat leathern flask from his capacious bosom, put it to his thick red lips, and took a draught of what was evidently a stronger and more congenial potation than the rules of St. Francis allowed to the brethren of his order.

“ Ah, ’t is fine! ” said the rotund giant with satisfaction, replacing the wooden stopple, and hiding the flask in his bosom. “ A blessing on my cousin the vintner for such a pottle of drink as this ! ’T is your true milch cow, by St. Dubric ! ”

He had resumed his former position when Bacon entered with the tankard.

“ What drug have you about you, Thomas ? ” he asked half absently, as he handed Bungy the water. “ I scent spice on the air.”

“ Nay, I know not,” coolly answered the friar, affecting to drink. “ Unless it be the odor of my sanctity,” he added, replacing the tankard on the shelf. “ Sooth, if holy men may smell of spice and roses in their graves, as ‘t is known they do, I know not why they may not in their lives.”

Bacon, absorbed in reverie, did not appear to have heard this audacious reply. “ A wild, warm day,” ran on Bungy, lolling on the settle. “ Brawl stirring again in the city, and the king’s men well thwacked, for which St. Becket be praised. And such labor of sun and clouds, and such clouds, have I never beheld. Pray God it be not a portent of toil and trouble for England. By Dunstan the blessed, I think the fiend is abroad in the realm this day. Such clouds, such clouds! And such devil’s roar of thunder, and devil’s sheeting of flame, and devil’s pelting of rain, as wrought hurly-burly above us ere the tempest passed! Now ’t is war of sun and clouds, and beshrew me if I do not think the clouds may defeat the sun, and leave the land without God’s candle. Lord forefend it be not an omen of coming battle betwixt our blessed Sir Simon and Harry of Winchester, and Sir Simon getting the worst of it! That were as good as putting out the sun itself.”

“ Fear not, Thomas,” said Bacon, starting from his musing and pacing up the room. “ Storms purge the air as struggle doth the realm, and in the war of cloud and sun, by God’s grace the sun is ever assured victor.”

Turning, he came down the chamber and took a chair near Bungy.

“ Hearken, Thomas,” he said in a low voice. “ To-day we finish the android, and I have now to tell you its purpose.”

Bungy instantly sat up, with his gross face radiant.

“ Speak on, Roger,” he said. “ I am all agog to hear.”

“ You have ever been one with me in brotherhood and stout heart against England’s plotting lords,” pursued Bacon. “ Swear to me now, Thomas, never to reveal aught of what I am to tell you.”

“ I swear it by the cross,” returned the friar, lifting the holy symbol which dangled at the end of his rosary.

“ ’T is well,” said Bacon. “Listen. In my youth, studying at Paris, I fell in, it matters not how, with a strange Italian scholar of great parts and learning, named Malatesti. Afterwards, proceeding to Italy, I visited him at his house, a lowly structure of stone on the outskirts of Padua, where he dwelt in utter solitude save for two blackamoor servitors, both mutes. A strange and indeed fearful man was he, scorning all mankind, and his conduct at times truly seemed to savor of insanie. Yet was he, after his manner, gracious to me, and for the rest passing learned. Great store, too, of books and manuscripts, precious as gems, had he; and, moreover, while beauteous in person, though darkly so, and hugely wealthy, he sought not the world’s vanities, but, like a true scholar, was all devoted to learning, which made me honor, though I could not love him.”

Bacon paused, his face saddening for an instant with an emotion perhaps of pity for a soul removed from God and man.

“ Go on, Roger,” said the openmouthed Bungy. “ By Swithin, this is as good as a miracle play when Bottle the tanner enacts the devil! ”

“At that time,” resumed Bacon, “our talk chanced to fall upon the story which Gervase de Tilbury and the monk Helinandus, with others, have recorded as true, though I esteem it as no more than an old wife’s fable, namely, that the famed Virgil did construct by magic art a head of brass which could speak and foretell events. Yet, withstanding me, did the Doctor Malatesti stoutly affirm this true; and such was his occult learning and wondrous logic that he did prove it true, and the thing itself easy to be done, so far as words can prove; nothing being proved, as I hold, save by experiment, and this thing mere absurdity, spite of the Paduan. But, what was really important, holding discussion with him on the nature and difference of sounds, he did show me that articulations, to a great extent, can be effected by simply natural means, so that a machine may be made to utter certain sentences. This machine, compact in form, placed within a bust of brass and set in motion, and lo, you have a brazen android which seems to speak of itself what by means of art it uttereth ! ”

Bungy clapped his big hands and stamped his feet, roaring with laughter.

“ Oh, brave, brave ! ” he shouted. “ This, then, is the machine we have made. St. Swithin be praised for my wondrous genius in braziery, whereby I have fashioned the brass andiron, or whatever the devil you please to call the shell of this thing ! ”

“ Android, not andiron,” said Bacon, smiling. “ ’Tis from the Greek.”

“ Nay, I cannot keep it in mind,” said Bungy lazily. “ I am so Christian in my very bones that the tongues of heathenesse will not abide in me. Good breviary Latin, which is a sound gospel language, and my mother English, both of them fit to be spoken in heaven, are all I can patter, blessed be God ! As for Greek and Arabic and the tongues of Mahound, faugh ! Fie upon such trash, I say! But the machine, Roger. You have wrought upon that apart from me. What will it utter, and for what purpose? ”

“ Hearken.” said Bacon. “I left the Paduan and returned to England. Many years passed on while I wrought at my books and in the laboratory, as you partly know, till about two years ago, when I was experimenting much in optics and acoustics at Oxford, recalling what the Paduan had said, I bethought me to fashion, in leisure hours, by way of diversion, such a machine as he had named. At the end of seven or eight months I had made a small apparatus which could utter distinctly enough these words : ‘ Art is the only magic.’ ”

“ Brave, brave ! ” murmured the excited Bungy, all eyes and ears.

“ It, delighted Robert Grostete and Adam de Marisco much,” continued Bacon ; “ but, bruited around, my envious foes heard of it, and the result was that I was prisoned in my cell and fared hardly, till the good bishop contrived to obtain my releasement. Then something marvelous happened, and, with De Marisco and Grostete privy to a scheme I had formed, I came here, the bishop lending me this house, and gaining me permission from the university to pursue certain scientific experiments herein. That was a year ago; and a few days before, at my request, you joined me, the Paduan, strange to say, visited me here.”

“ Blessed be his name ! ” said Bungy fervently.

“Nay,” returned Bacon, “ I hardly liked his coming, nor did his visit wholly please me. His conduct savored even more of insanie than when I had seen him years before, and he had certain knowledges of things said and done which almost appalled me, though I have thought that some persons, particularly of disordered minds, breed within them knowledges not common to man, even as diseased oysters breed within them pearls, which are not common to that fish; and in both cases the marvel is one of nature, and not of magic.”

Bacon paused reflectively, while at the mention of fish, which was a chief article of diet in those days, Bungy, though mainly engaged with his fellow-friar’s narrative, instinctively licked his lips, probably in honor of the oysters, which were then somewhat of a delicacy.

“ The Paduan’s tone was strange,” resumed Bacon. “ I told him of the machine I had made, and in what followed he urged — indeed, I may say, even commanded — me to fashion an android of brass under certain planetary conjunctions and aspects, according to the rules of magic, which he said would in due time answer questions and prophesy, being inhabited by a spirit. His tone was such that I thought not of disputing with him, and, assuming that I would obey, he left me minute directions in writing, and also, what was most strange, drawings of the internal structure of the human head, neck, and bosom, in whose likeness, he said, the interior of the bust must be fashioned, and with various metals. These drawings he had made, he told me, by dissecting the human corpse ” —

“ Heavenly God! ” ejaculated Bungy, turning pale. “ Open a corpse ! Sacrilege ! ”

“ Nay,” said Bacon firmly. “ I think not so. The illustrious Mondini has done the same. Why not ? Bodies are cloven in battle, and even mutilated after death. If this may be done in the spirit of war, or, worse, in the spirit of murder, nor be deemed sacrilege, why may it not be done as blamelessly in the spirit of truth and love for the advancement of knowledge, which is the profit of the world ? ”

“ By St. Thomas à Kent, that is well argued ! ” returned Bungy, rolling his eyes. “ But natheless ‘t is a grave matter to carve up a man like a stockfish.”

“ However, ” resumed Bacon, “ the Paduan, promising to return to England in a year, left me, and I, disregarding his talk, though I own that in his presence he almost compelled my mind to his thought and will, set about fashioning the apparatus for the android on which we have wrought together.”

“ And which is now completed, or will be soon,” said Bungy eagerly. “ But for what purpose ? ”

“ Attend, good frère,” pursued Bacon. “ Dost remember when this base king built the stone bulwark next the Tower, a wasp’s nest of prisons, in which the rich merchants were to be confined till they paid him heavy sums of money?”

“ Truly do I,” replied the friar. “ ’T was in 1239. But St. Thomas à Becket brought confusion upon it; for well do I remember the night when the solid bulwark fell down with great din, as though an earthquake had set his shoulder to it.”

“ Natheless he builded it again,” said Bacon, with a gloomy smile.

“Ay, did he,” responded Bungy, “and at a cost of twelve thousand marks. Yet no sooner up than down again. ’T was in 1241. St. Thomas guards his Londoners well.”

“ And well may he guard them,” said Bacon quietly. “ But ’t was not St. Thomas à Becket brought confusion upon Harry of Winchester’s vile jail. ’T was I.”

Bungy’s fat face became blank with stupefaction.

“You ! ” he roared. “ Roger, are you demented ? ”

Bacon arose and went to a cupboard, from which he returned in a few moments with a lighted taper and a small metal phial.

“ I have told you of the explosive properties of the powder of nitre and coal,” he said, “but in this little flask, which I brought in from the laboratory to show you, there is a vapor generated by vitriol and water on iron dust which is also explosive. Look.”

Unstopping the phial, he held it aloft, with the light above it. A bright flash followed.

“ Confine that vapor in a cell,” he said to the staring Bungy, “apply flame, and ’twill rive all before it.”

He extinguished the taper, replaced it with the phial, and resumed his seat.

“An officer of the Tower,” he continued, “had a brother, a rich merchant, on whom he knew the oppression was likely to fall, and chancing to unburden his heart to me, whom he knew, for his brother’s sake he willingly lent himself to my scheme. One night, ere the bulwark was inhabited, or indeed well finished, he took me to lodge with him in the White Tower, and in the night we went in by a private passage to a cell in the basement of the bulwark. I placed in a large earthen vessel he had left there the quantity of iron filings I had brought, and, adding the vitriol and water, covered the whole till the inflammable vapor was evolved. Then, uncovering it, we hastily retired, making all fast behind us, and leaving in the cell a little machine contrived so that it would strike a light within a certain time. That night, as I said, I lodged with him in the White Tower, and in a little while we heard the dull roar of the toppling bulwark. Ay, and again was the same thing done, and again the exploding vapor rived that stronghold of tyranny. The third time never came for its rebuilding.”

Bungy heaved a prodigious sigh.

“ By St. Dubric, ’t was a parlous brave deed ! ” he exclaimed. “ ‘T was done well! ”

It was done for the good of the people,” said Bacon sternly. “ Lamed by fortune, not often have I been able, in mine obscurity, to work them such signal service. Yet twice, at least, have I wrought well for them, and now for the third time I come to their service with the brazen android.”

“ To their service ! ” cried Bungy, with a great start.

“ Ay,” replied Bacon. “ I told you that, just ere my coming here to execute the scheme whereto my lord of Lincoln and De Marisco are privy, something marvelous happened, and it was that suggested my scheme.”

“ What was it that happened ? ” murmured Bungy.

“ The king dreamed a strange dream. Dost remember ? ” asked Bacon sombrely.

“ I do,” replied Bungy, after a moment’s pause, in which the color rushed to hiS startled features. “ It troubled him sorely, and was the land’s talk for a good season.”

“ Truly was it,” said Bacon. “ He dreamed of lodging in an unfamiliar room, where a Brazen Head appeared and spoke to him, giving him good counsel. But what it said, waking he could not remember. Yet eagerly did he strive to recall what it had spoken, and sorely did he long that such an image might indeed appear to him. &8216; You would die of fear,’ said Humphrey de Bohun to him. ‘ Nay, by God’s head,’ said the king, ‘ I would calmly listen ; ay, and abide by its counsel.’ ”

Bungy gasped, and with the sleeve of his habit mopped the perspiration from a face redder than fire with his excitement.

“ Hear, now,” said Bacon, leaning forward as he sat, and speaking in low and sombre tones, with his gray eyes jewel-bright, and fixed piercingly on the visage of the friar. “The time has come when the welfare of England demands that the king shall be guided by De Montfort.”

“ Ay, does it! ” roared Bungy, with patriotic fervor, bringing down his fist like a mallet on the solid arm of the settle.

“ What if he should hear such good counsel as this ? ” urged Bacon. “ What if this superstitious king, with the memory of his dream upon him, should have a brazen android appear to him indeed, and speak thus for his salvation ? Behold, the android is made ! ”

“And it will speak to him ? ” panted Bungy.

Bacon rose swiftly and silently to his feet, like a ghost, and stood dilated, with a white light on his marble brow and wasted features, and his eyes flaming in their hollow orbits.

“ Ay,” he said, in a low and thrilling voice, “it will speak my thought to him ! It will utter Roger Bacon’s message to the king of England ! ”

There was a moment of motionless silence ; then, like a majestic phantom, he moved up the room, while Bungy, like one released from a spell, his red face convulsed with a shock of emotions, fell back heavily on the settle, overpowered with the revelation.

Two or three minutes of utter stillness had passed in the golden gloom of the chamber, when Bungy, with a breath like a bellows, raised his bulk to an upright position, and stretched out his huge legs with an air of boundless pride.

“ By Dunstan, I have wrought well to have holped make such a brave andrew as this,” he said, in his big bass voice. “ Saints, but I feel as if I, and not Sir Simon, were the Mattathias of the suffering people ! ”

Bacon smiled wanly, and, approaching, resumed his chair.

“ I have yet to tell you, Frère Thomas,” he said quietly, “ how the android is to obtain audience of the king.”

“ Ay,” returned Bungy, “ and what it is to say to him.”

“ What it is to say I defer till you hear it speak yourself,” was the answer. “ For the rest, listen. The original design was to beguile the king into visiting Robert Grostete at his house in Lincoln, which could easily be done ; when, at night, he would find the android in his chamber, and hear it speak in the presence of his attendants. But lately fortune has favored me with a better plan,— one, indeed, which makes it unnecessary that the image should speak by machinery, since a man within it might say all it will say. In the former design this could not have been, for there was no place to set it but in a narrow niche, where a man could not be concealed, whereas now we have a pedestal ample enough to hide a person, and also to light the android by an unknown process, as then only the king’s lamp would have lighted it. But hearken. In the next house lives aged Master Trenchard, once a silk merchant, now rich, and no longer a trafficker. His house and this are both old, dating back to the reign of King Richard. But, what is not known, though I discovered it not long after I came here, there is a secret passage from one house into the other through the party-wall of the laboratory.”

“ Oh! ” grunted Bungy, in astonishment.

“ When we go into the laboratory, I will show it to you,” said Bacon. “ But now hear something wonderful. You know that it hath long been the fashion of this paltry king to go about lodging with men of all stations, and begging gifts of them.”

“ Ay ! ” snorted Bungy, with ineffable contempt.

“ Five years ago,” continued Bacon, “ he paid such a visit to old Master Trenchard, and obtained from him an hundred marks. But what think you ? This morning Master Trenchard received a message from the king that he would lodge with him on the third night hence, having, he said, certain proposals to offer him.”

Bungy broke into a roar of laughter, stamping his feet and pounding with his hands.

“ How found you this, Roger?” he said at last, still snuffling and choking with suppressed mirth.

“ Master Trenchard himself told me this morning,” answered Bacon quietly. “ The poor man is anything but pleased with the prospect of the king’s visit.“

“ Marry, I ’ll warrant you ! ” tittered Bungy ; “ for well he knows what proposals Harry of Winchester will have to offer, and his coffers already rattle with fear.”

“ Perchance Master Trenchard’s coffers may be spared this time,” said Bacon.

“ How so ? ” replied Bungy, with an incredulous air.

“ Because the king will lodge that night in the merchant’s best chamber.”

“ And what of that ? ” retorted the burly friar.

“ Because the secret passage whereof I spoke opens by a sliding panel into the chamber where the king will lodge,” said Bacon, with his eyes on fire.

Bungy instantly sobered, and his large face grew red as a rising autumn moon.

“ I see it all! ” he said, with a voice like a muffled roar. “ The andrew will break the king’s sleep by appearing at the open panel.”

“ Ay ! ” replied Bacon, in clear, hollow tones. “ In the dead stillness of the night the panel will withdraw, and the king, starting from his bed, will see at the cavity, distinct in yellow light, the android of his dream! So, while he gazes spellbound, he shall hear from its lips the good counsel which he shall now remember. Then darkness shall fall, and in the darkness the android shall recede, the panel close, and the king be left alone. But that counsel shall shape his life to its latest day ! ”

“ By St. Bechet,” shouted Bungy, springing to his feet with an agility none would have suspected him capable of, and striding, with heavy foot-flaps, to and fro, “ this is the rarest plot that ever was plotted ! It is the most ” — Cuthbert Hoole darted into the room in a frenzy of excitement.

“ Time is ! ” he screeched, in a sort of chant. “ Time is ! the Brass-Man ! Time is ! the Brass-Man ! Aroint thee, Zernebock ! Aroint thee, Zernebock ! ” “ Aroint thee, thou gibbering brute ! ” howled Bungy, plunging down like a rhinoceros upon the idiot, who vanished, leaving the door slightly ajar behind him. “ Was ever the like of this ! Hath the foul fiend possessed the ill-mannered bunch that he thus — Sooth, but I will take a cudgel to him if he beginneth these freaks ! But what the plague — How dark the room grows ! ”

He had turned at the sudden fading of the light, but his eyes, as they glanced to the window, were arrested midway by the aspect of his fellow-friar. Bacon had risen to his feet, and stood in the pale gray gloom of the chamber, looking towards the door with parted lips and his visage white as death.

“ It is a cloud passing over the sun,” he said, in a slow, collected voice.

“ Eh ? ” grunted Bungy, astonished.

“ This troubles me,” murmured Bacon.

“ What ? The cloud ? ” said Bungy, staring at him.

“ I was speaking of Cuthbert,” replied Bacon wanderingly. “ I know not what can ail him.”

“ Huh ! ” sulkily snorted Bungy. “ I know not why you keep such an ill-witted oaf about you. I would sell him to a farmer.”

“ Nay,” rejoined Bacon curtly, “ I do not sell men. I had Cuthbert from my rich brother in Somersetshire, and, taking him in pity, I owe him protection.”

“ Ay,” sulked Bungy, dumping down again upon the settle, while Bacon also resumed his seat. “ Kindness, kindness! ’T is a voice in you, Roger. Beshrew me, but I think you would be kind to Jews! ”

“ Truly would I,” said Bacon. “ I love not oppression, nor outrage in any form ; and, to my thinking, in these outraged Jews again is Christ Jesu daily mocked, and scourged, and crucified.”

Bungy looked a trifle abashed, but presently relaxed from his sullen mood, and laughed good-naturedly.

“ Well, well,” he said, “ Jews or Gentiles, I mean them no harm. But to return to this brave andrew, or what you may call it — Body o’ me. how dark the room grows! Sooth, ’t is a grisly twilight, though we have not reached the middle of the afternoon ! By my dame, ’t is dark as though yon clouds were the black wings of the devil spread over the land, and the devil ” •—

“Ah, yes, the devil!—long life to the devil! ” said a singular, shrill voice.

Both friars leaped up aghast. The door was wide open, and on the threshold, in the gloomy brown light, and relieved against the shadowy passage, stood a dark, imperial figure, with a face like marble.

William Douglas O’Connor.