n of Edward the
Sixth. But Mistress Winter's disapprobation, combined with her own
indifference, had been enough to keep her away, and the half-discourse
of John Laurence at the Cross had been the only sermon she remembered to
have heard during the five years of her residence with that delectable
dame. Many thoughts, therefore, now familiar to the church-going
public, were quite new to her.

If she could but once again come across Friar Laurence!

CHAPTER FIVE.

AGNES IS ASKED A QUESTION.

"Whate'er I say, whate'er I syng,
Whate'er I do, that hart shall se,
That I shall serue with hart lovyng
That lovyng hart that lovyth me."

Few things are more touching in their way than the fragment of paper
containing the poem from which the motto to this chapter is a quotation.
Among the dusty business manuscripts of the Dean and Chapter of
Canterbury, in the oldest division, relating to the affairs of the
Priory of Christ Church, were found by the Historical Commission two
songs, scribbled on scraps of paper. One was a love-song of the common
type, such as, allowing for difference of diction, might be had in any
second-rate music-shop of the present day. But the other was of a very
different and far higher order. It was the cry of the immured bird
which has been forced from its nest in the greenwood, and for which life
has no other attraction than to sit mournfully at the door of the cage,
looking out to the fair fields, and the blue sky in which it shall
stretch its wings no more. None but God will ever know the name or the
story of that poor heart-weary monk, torn from all that he loved on
earth, who thus "pressed his soul on paper," one hundred years before
the dissolution of the monasteries. We can only hope that through the
superincumbent wood, hay, stubble, he dug down to the one Foundation and
was safe: that through the dead words of the Latin services he heard the
Living Voice calling to all the weary and heavy-laden, and that he too
came and found rest.

But to turn to our story.

The days rolled slowly on, undistinguishable from one another save by
the practical divisions of baking-day, washing-day, brewing-day, and so
forth; and, certainly, not distinguished by any increase of comfort in
the outward surroundings of Agnes's lot. She was trying to do her work
heartily, as to the Lord; but it did seem to her that the harder she
tried, the harder Mistress Winter was to please; the crosser was J