ere her murmurs for
Carinthia's ears in commending 'the most real of husbands of an unreal
wife' to her friendly care of him when he would no longer see the shadow
he had wedded. She had the privilege of a soul beyond our minor rules and
restrainings to speak her wishes to the true wife of a mock husband-no
husband; less a husband than this shadow of a woman a wife, she said; and
spoke them without adjuring the bowed head beside her to record a promise
or seem to show the far willingness, but merely that the wishes should be
heard on earth in her last breath, for a good man's remaining one chance
of happiness. On the theme touching her husband Owain, it was verily to
hear a soul speak, and have knowledge of the broader range, the rich
interflowings of the tuned discords, a spirit past the flesh can find.
Her mind was at the same time alive to our worldly conventions when other
people came under its light; she sketched them and their views in her
brief words between the gasps, with perspicuous, humorous bluntness, as
vividly as her twitched eyebrows indicated the laugh. Gower Woodseer she
read startlingly, if correctly.

Carinthia could not leave her. Attendance upon this dying woman was a
drinking at the springs of life.

Rebecca Wythan under earth, the earl was briefly informed of Lady
Fleetwood's consent to quit Wales, obedient to a summons two months
old,--and that she would be properly escorted; for the which her lord had
made provision. Consequently the tyrant swallowed his wrath, little
conceiving the monstrous blow she was about to strike.

In peril of fresh floods from our Dame, who should be satisfied with the
inspiring of these pages, it is owned that her story of 'the four and
twenty squires of Glamorgan and Caermarthen in their brass-buttoned green
coats and buckskins, mounted and armed, an escort of the Countess of
Fleetwood across the swollen Severn, along midwinter roads, up to the
Kentish gates of Esslemont,' has a foundation, though the story is not
the more credible for her flourish of documentary old ballad-sheets,
printed when London's wags had ears on cock to any whisper of the doings.
of their favourite Whitechapel Countess; and indeed hardly depended on
whispers.

Enthusiasm sufficient to troop forth four and twenty and more hundreds of
Cambrian gentlemen, and still more of the common folk, as far as they
could journey afoot, was over the two halves of the Principality, to give
the countess a