lgium to
this country, and may now be seen adorning various of our parish
churches, cathedrals, and private chapels. Steinfeld Abbey was among the
most considerable of these involuntary contributors to our artistic
possession (I am quoting the somewhat ponderous preamble of the book
which the antiquary wrote), and the greater part of the glass from that
institution can be identified without much difficulty by the help, either
of the numerous inscriptions in which the place is mentioned, or of the
subjects of the windows, in which several well-defined cycles or
narratives were represented.

The passage with which I began my story had set the antiquary on the
track of another identification. In a private chapel--no matter where--he
had seen three large figures, each occupying a whole light in a window,
and evidently the work of one artist. Their style made it plain that that
artist had been a German of the sixteenth century; but hitherto the more
exact localizing of them had been a puzzle. They represented--will you be
surprised to hear it?--JOB PATRIARCHA, JOHANNES EVANGELISTA, ZACHARIAS
PROPHETA, and each of them held a book or scroll, inscribed with a
sentence from his writings. These, as a matter of course, the antiquary
had noted, and had been struck by the curious way in which they differed
from any text of the Vulgate that he had been able to examine. Thus the
scroll in Job's hand was inscribed: _Auro est locus in quo absconditur_
(for _conflatur_)[6]; on the book of John was: _Habent in vestimentis
suis scripturam quam nemo novit_[7] (for in _vestimento scriptum_, the
following words being taken from another verse); and Zacharias had:
_Super lapidem unum septem oculi sunt_[8] (which alone of the three
presents an unaltered text).

[6] There is a place for gold where it is hidden.

[7] They have on their raiment a writing which no man knoweth.

[8] Upon one stone are seven eyes.

A sad perplexity it had been to our investigator to think why these three
personages should have been placed together in one window. There was no
bond of connexion between them, either historic, symbolic, or doctrinal,
and he could only suppose that they must have formed part of a very large
series of Prophets and Apostles, which might have filled, say, all the
clerestory windows of some capacious church. But the passage from the
_Sertum_ had altered the situation by showing that the names of the
actual personages represen