esolved to dishonor me? Torture and death are awaiting me, but what
are these to the shame of an infamous act, or the wounds of a guilty
mind? Slave as I am to Carthage, I still have the spirit of a Roman.
I have sworn to return. It is my duty. Let the gods take care of the
rest."

The courage which Cranmer had shown since the accession of Mary gave
way the moment his final doom was announced. The moral cowardice which
had displayed itself in his miserable compliance with the lust and
despotism of Henry displayed itself again in six successive
recantations by which he hoped to purchase pardon. But pardon was
impossible; and Cranmer's strangely mingled nature found a power in its
very weakness when he was brought into the church of St. Mary at Oxford
on the 21st of March, to repeat his recantation on the way to the
stake. "Now," ended his address to the hushed congregation before
him,--"now I come to the great thing that troubleth my conscience more
than any other thing that ever I said or did in my life, and that is
the setting abroad of writings contrary to the truth; which here I now
renounce and refuse as things written by a hand contrary to the truth
which I thought in my heart, and written for fear of death to save my
life, if it might be. And, forasmuch as my hand offended in writing
contrary to my heart, my hand therefore shall be the first punished;
for if I come to the fire it shall be the first burned." "This was the
hand that wrote it," he again exclaimed at the stake, "therefore it
shall suffer first punishment;" and holding it steadily in the flame,
"he never stirred nor cried till life was gone."

"Oh, if I were only a man!" exclaimed Rebecca Bates, a girl of
fourteen, as she looked from the window of a lighthouse at Scituate,
Mass., during the War of 1812, and saw a British warship anchor in the
harbor. "What could you do?" asked Sarah Winsor, a young visitor.
"See what a lot of them the boats contain, and look at their guns!" and
she pointed to five large boats, filled with soldiers in scarlet
uniforms, who were coming to burn the vessels in the harbor and destroy
the town. "I don't care, I'd fight," said Rebecca. "I'd use father's
old shotgun--anything. Think of uncle's new boat and the sloop! And
how hard it is to sit here and see it all, and not lift a finger to
help. Father and uncle are in the village and will do all they can.
How still it is in the town! There is not a man to be se