rably safe guess to assert that Ferris
was a Lutheran. Scarcely would a Gospeller have filled that position on
that day.

Perhaps the relics of Dr Thorpe's Lutheranism were to blame for his
persistent determination to have Twelfth Day kept with all the honours.
He insisted on cake and snap-dragon, and was rewarded for his urgency by
drawing the king, while Kate was found to be his queen. Their mimic
majesties were seated in two large chairs at one end of the parlour, the
white-haired king laughing like a child, while the little queen was as
grave as a judge. The snap-dragon followed, for which a summary
abdication took place; and greatly amused was the old man to find Walter
in abject fear of burning his fingers, while Kate plunged her hand into
the blue flaming dish with sufficient courage for any knight in
Christendom. The evening closed with hot cockles, after which Esther
took possession of the children, declaring, with more earnestness than
was her wont, that they must and should not stay up another minute.

"Verily," said the old Doctor, when they were gone, "if the childre must
be had away, then should I follow; for I do feel in myself as though I
were a little child to-night."

"So you have been, methinks," responded Isoult, smiling on him, "for
assuredly they had enjoyed far less mirth without you."

And now the dark cloud closed over England, which was to be the one blot
on the reign of our Josiah. Poor young King! he was but fourteen; how
could he tell the depth of iniquity that was hidden in those cold blue
eyes of the man who was hunting the hapless Duke of Somerset to death?
Probably there was only one man who fully fathomed it, and that was the
victim himself. And his voice was sterling in England no more.

Words fail in the attempt to describe what the Duke's execution was to
the Gospellers. There was not one of them, from the Tyne to the Land's
End, who for the country's sake would not joyfully have given his life
for the life of Somerset. He was only a man, and a sinful man too; yet
such as he was, speaking after the manner of men, he was the hope of the
Gospel cause. To every Gospeller it was as the last plague of Egypt;
and to judge by the lamentations to be heard in all their houses, it
might have been supposed that "there was not an house where there was
not one dead." It is not often that a whole land mourns like this.
Among her sons England has not many darlings, but those that she