prison and remitted his fine. He
provided good homes for the daughters of the two Baptist women whom he
saw burned at the stake, and roundly punished the official who laid the
undeserved stripes upon Miles Hendon's back.

He saved from the gallows the boy who had captured the stray falcon, and
also the woman who had stolen a remnant of cloth from a weaver; but he
was too late to save the man who had been convicted of killing a deer in
the royal forest.

He showed favour to the justice who had pitied him when he was supposed
to have stolen a pig, and he had the gratification of seeing him grow in
the public esteem and become a great and honoured man.

As long as the King lived he was fond of telling the story of his
adventures, all through, from the hour that the sentinel cuffed him away
from the palace gate till the final midnight when he deftly mixed himself
into a gang of hurrying workmen and so slipped into the Abbey and climbed
up and hid himself in the Confessor's tomb, and then slept so long, next
day, that he came within one of missing the Coronation altogether. He
said that the frequent rehearsing of the precious lesson kept him strong
in his purpose to make its teachings yield benefits to his people; and
so, whilst his life was spared he should continue to tell the story, and
thus keep its sorrowful spectacles fresh in his memory and the springs of
pity replenished in his heart.

Miles Hendon and Tom Canty were favourites of the King, all through his
brief reign, and his sincere mourners when he died. The good Earl of Kent
had too much sense to abuse his peculiar privilege; but he exercised it
twice after the instance we have seen of it before he was called from
this world--once at the accession of Queen Mary, and once at the
accession of Queen Elizabeth. A descendant of his exercised it at the
accession of James I. Before this one's son chose to use the privilege,
near a quarter of a century had elapsed, and the 'privilege of the Kents'
had faded out of most people's memories; so, when the Kent of that day
appeared before Charles I. and his court and sat down in the sovereign's
presence to assert and perpetuate the right of his house, there was a
fine stir indeed! But the matter was soon explained, and the right
confirmed. The last Earl of the line fell in the wars of the
Commonwealth fighting for the King, and the odd privilege ended with him.

Tom Canty lived to be a very old man, a handsome, white-