schoolfellow. Ha, ha! what is cord and gibbet to one so tempted?"

A tear stood in the bright gray eyes of the bluff visitor. "Ah, Adam,"
he said sadly, "only by the candle held in the skeleton hand of Poverty
can man read his own dark heart. But thou, Workman of Knowledge,
hast the same interest as the poor who dig and delve. Though strange
circumstance hath made me the servant and emissary of Margaret, think
not that I am but the varlet of the great." Hilyard paused a moment, and
resumed,--

"Thou knowest, peradventure, that my race dates from an elder date than
these Norman nobles, who boast their robber-fathers. From the
renowned Saxon Thane, who, free of hand and of cheer, won the name of
Hildegardis, [Hildegardis, namely, old German, a person of noble or
generous disposition. Wotton's "Baronetage," art. Hilyard, or Hildyard,
of Pattrington.] our family took its rise. But under these Norman barons
we sank with the nation to which we belonged. Still were we called
gentlemen, and still were dubbed knights. But as I grew up to man's
estate, I felt myself more Saxon than gentleman, and, as one of a
subject and vassal race, I was a son of the Saxon people. My father,
like thee, was a man of thought and bookcraft. I dare own to thee
that he was a Lollard; and with the religion of those bold foes to
priest-vice, goes a spirit that asks why the people should be evermore
the spoil and prey of lords and kings. Early in my youth, my father,
fearing rack and fagot in England, sought refuge in the Hans town
of Lubeck. There I learned grave truths,--how liberty can be won and
guarded. Later in life I saw the republics of Italy, and I asked why
they were so glorious in all the arts and craft of civil life, while the
braver men of France and England seemed as savages by the side of the
Florentine burgess, nay, of the Lombard vine-dresser. I saw that, even
when those republics fell a victim to some tyrant or podesta, their men
still preserved rights and uttered thoughts which left them more free
and more great than the Commons of England after all their boasted wars.
I came back to my native land and settled in the North, as my franklin
ancestry before me. The broad lands of my forefathers had devolved on
the elder line, and gave a knight's fee to Sir Robert Hilyard, who fell
afterwards at Towton for the Lancastrians. But I had won gold in the
far countree, and I took farm and homestead near Lord Warwick's tower of
Middleham. The