with a long flying veil, all saying farewell. "We shall see you again, my beloved, and then you will stay with us," the two nuns had said.

Sister Françoise had been putting linen in the cupboard, great heavy sheets with blue lines: the doors were open with the crosses on the corner panels. Françoise had turned her pale nose ("Will mine look like that?" wondered Blanche): "Before you go, dear angel, your eyes are so clear, look at my silver ring; tell me whether it is bent. I showed it to Sister Catherine, but she cannot see anything amiss, and yet, by holding it to the light, does it not appear somewhat flattened, just by the silver heart?"

Blanche had taken the ring and the chain with its mythical symbols of hearts and flames into her hand. "What does it signify whether it is bent or not, Sister Françoise?" she asked.

"It matters it matters a great deal; why, the good mother herself I shall ask M. le Curé next time he comes. Dear child, you are not going away in the convent dress?"

"She has leave to wear it," said the sister Angelique. "It is a special grace, for her own clothes are not come from the dressmaker's."

So it all came back to her, Blanche thought, with a sting of self-reproach: how familiar and kind those worn faces were! Perhaps that was why Mathilde, with her worn looks, seemed more like home to her than her aunt, herself comfortable and handsome in that well-appointed room; and then Blanche thought of a life devoted, of highest impulse on earth leading to glorious reward in heaven, so they told her, so the Curé had told her just now; but would there not still be time in another year? she wanted to wait for the fête next month; she wanted leave to keep a dog in the convent; she wanted - what did she want? She thought of the fisherman's wife the night before, of the sea, of the moonlight: everything seemed to hurt, to tear her in every direction; she need not determine yet, not yet not yet.

The Curé was still on the terrace, but she brushed past him without speaking.

This much Blanche felt that she must do; she must see him again, to say good-by to her friend, and give him the thing that he wished for; this much was her right. She had not talked to Hugh all those long hours without being somehow carried away from her old boundaries, never to return to them, never again.

Had Blanche chosen? She knew not what she had chosen. She was in a miserable state of doubt and indecision. She felt herself watched; Denise was for ever in her way; the Curé of St. Rambert was always there.

One day Bismarck's former owner, who had been hovering about the terrace for some time, came up to Blanche as she passed on her way from mass. Denise sharply told her to make way, but Madame Roullot persisted. The gentleman who had bought the dog was come back, and had he brought good news of poor Bibi?

Blanche had sent a message to our children to come up and walk in the garden of the chateau whenever they liked; they were English- that was enough to make them her friends. One day the whole company straggled up along the dusty road, Albinia flitting ahead with her Binnie clinging to her skirts. The Major carried the little one, and Marjory and Anne proudly bore their provisions in their little baskets; the homeliest fare, short bread and rolls, and milk in a stone jug. They found a tea-table, an old leaf-besprinkled bench among crisp autumnal avenues; they made a centre-piece of daisies in a saucer. Α few brown leaves dropped into their cups, but they rendered them all the more intoxicating. Children love open air, they love play, and they love their elders to look on at their gambols. As we all sat round, resting after our hot toil, we saw a figure advancing along the avenue; it came out of an old shed which had been built against the wall not far from where we were sitting.

"Who is it?" said H. "Is it a nun or a peasant woman?"

It was some one dressed in a coif and a l floating veil over a gray serge dress; this person it was, advanced a little way, then went back, tl forward again. . .

The pupils in the convents of the sisters of the the Holy Pilgrims, wear a very singular and un dress; it is made of gray merino, plainly cut, long sleeves falling upon their hands. Their yo are enclosed in white caps with narrow frills, to attached black floating veils, which give them the appearance of nuns themselves. This dress coming, but there are those for whom the quain only serves as a foil. Blanche de Latouche was one of these. Neither caps, nor veils, nor prim could shade her sudden beauty; the soft eye through quills of any depth, and veils far thicke gauze that was floating along the garden path veiled apparition was not a nun-it was Blanc convent school-girl dress. Some feeling had mad it on to-day. She knew that Hugh would be com was the day he had promised to come. All day lo been expecting him; all day long she had been her mind quietly, with gentle perversity, that help him to get what he wanted; that her farew him should be this model, upon which he had set It was hers her father had left it her; this knew, she had a right to her own as yet. It w she had taken the key from the shelf where it thilde's cupboard, neatly docketed with the ot had come down to assure herself that all was ri the lock would turn. She feared she knew She half expected the Archbishop, armed w thunders of the church, to appear, and carry his arm. Suddenly she saw the little conclave with wide-open eyes. She had never spoken to but as she came forward gently towards us, s path as a child might have done

Albinia went to meet her. "I am glad to wel Blanche said prettily in English. "I hope gave you our message. Any time my aunt will see you at the chateau. Have you enough n we send you anything from the house? W children like to play upon the terrace? prospect."

the

She said it all so kindly, and with such co that we could not refuse; and so it happened Hugh Gourlay came walking up from the inn teau, after his week's absence, he found us all installed in the meadow in front of the house. dren were playing a game-Marjory, Anne, Binnie at their four corners of the world stood in the centre, gleeful, clapping her ha darted from one side to another. The childre and flew with all their hearts in the game, capering here and there.

hold

They were all in the midst of their playcame up. I saw him look very strange, and hur across the grass: the children began to shout out that he must join them.

"Blanche is puss! Blanche is puss! T cried little Dodo, tumbling across his path. seemed to set them all flying and capering meadow, and Blanche suddenly darted ahead, and round from tree to tree, from bush to bush. figure flew, the children followed in the hotte excitement.

Mathilde appeared upon the terrace. I say selle herself, with one of her priests, was look

her tower windows.

As Blanche started off she passed close to want you," she said; then Hugh, with a ch shoulder, set off running too, and the whole par under the nut-trees. We could hear their voi on long after they had disappeared.

Blanche led the way by the covered path t shed; there she suddenly stopped short, and a dren surrounded her, calling out that she was c

"Make haste! make haste! Here is the Curé running after us," cried the children, excitedly.

"Cut it!" cried Blanche, impatiently; "cut the string; it fastens the cap and the veil too."

Hugh pulled out his big knife, and in an instant had snipped the cap-string, and with the string the veil gave way, and Blanche, springing free once more, shook all her beautiful sunshine of hair in a glistening mist over her shoulders; then she turned, laughing and blushing, to thank him. The cap lay on the ground in the sunshine. "Mademoiselle Bla-an-an-an-che; sang Mathilde in the distance, calling, your aunt wants you." "Oh, she is a fairy princess," sang Binnie, dancing about madly, and clapping his hands.

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The two looked at each other. They had forgotten the children's presence. "Oh, think well of it!" he was saying. "Leave all this behind. Come with me - come home to your home in England. I will take care of you." He spoke in a voice that seemed to carry Blanche away by its reality. - by its natural might of tender protection. Do you hear me? You frightened me dreadfully," said Hugh. "Speak, Blanche. Give me your hand."

As if in a dream, she put her hand in his. The children had begun a new song and set off dancing along the avenue; the two, still hand-in-hand, walked on, following unconsciously. Little Marjory dropped all the daisies out of her nosegay in their path as she ran; little Dodo picked up a pretty, golden leaf and threw it at Blanche's white skirt. They all turned down a side alley. The Curé de St. Rambert, coming up to the place where they had been standing, only found the cap lying in the sunshine, and the long veil still floating from a branch.

In those days marriages between Catholics and Protestants were not so strictly forbidden as now. Hugh had a battle to fight, but we all know what happened when the Prince drew his sword.

My hero won his bride. Blanche married him as soon as she came of age. Old Mr. Gourlay was enchanted. Ben and Bathurst both married also, soon after Hugh.

Blanche is very happy at Gilwick. She is far the sweetest of the three brides. She is a great favorite with her father-in-law, and since her coming Bismarck has ceased to regret Normandy.

SHAKESPEARE'S SON-IN-LAW.

A STUDY OF OLD STRATFOrd.

STRATFORD-UPON-AVON in the seventeenth century nust have presented a very perfect type of the small midland owns which ranked in size and importance between the villages and the larger boroughs. Grouped about a fair

and stately church and an old Guildhouse were three or four streets of low, half-timber houses, sparingly intermixed with a few of larger size, such as the College where Combe lived, and the ever memorable New Place, environed by well wooded gardens and gently sloping towards the river, which then, as to-day, crept lazily through the many arches of the old bridge, now " making sweet music to the enamelled stones" of the shallows, now heavy and stagnant in the deep pools under the shadow of the elms and willows. Imagine this, with a foreground of rich meadow land, dank and moist as Cuyp's river banks, streaked with tall hedgerows and backed by the undulating banks which do duty for hills in this part of England, and you have a picture of Stratford as it must have appeared in the time of Shakespeare. The fertility of this middlemost valley of England is unrivalled. Dry and matter-of-fact Speed, who knew the district well, and was a frequent visitor at Warwick, hard by, is almost betrayed into poetry when he comes to describe "the meandering pastures, with their green mantles so embroidered with flowers, that from Edgehill we behold another Eden." In our day, Hugh Miller, rambling by the Avon on a hot day in June, descants with enthusiasm upon the rich aquatic vegetation, and declares that he had seen nothing in living nature which so well enabled him to realize the luxuriant semitropical life of the period of the coal measures. But the beauty of the landscape is very treacherous. Built or bor

dering upon low alluvial soil, near the point where the great red sandstone district of central England begins to be overlaid by the lias, the town is very liable to floods, which year after year leave behind them a plentiful crop of fevers and agues. In the autumn months it often happens that the quiet little river, swollen by hundreds of tiny confluents from the high grounds, spreads itself along the valley into the semblance of a huge mere, and the scene from Stratford Bridge is

A flat malarian world of reed and rush.

The whole neighborhood was formerly very unhealthy. If we may depend upon the entries of burials in the parish register, the death-rate during the last twenty-five years of the sixteenth century must have greatly exceeded that of a modern manufacturing town; and in the very year of Shakespeare's birth, the plague is estimated to have carried off one seventh of the inhabitants. Even in these days of improved drainage the rate is high. Out of one hundred and eighty-eight deaths from natural causes in 1868, sixty-six were registered as caused by zymotic diseases. The neighborhood of Stratford has always given employment to a number of doctors, and in the time of Elizabeth there is reason to believe that this little town or its immediate vicinity possessed two physicians, besides several apothecaries, and a number of the irregular practitioners who always abound in aguish districts. During the first quarter of the seventeenth century the most noted of the Stratford doctors was John Hall, who had the luck to immortalize his name by marrying the eldest daughter of Shakespeare. The register of Stratford, under the date of 1607, has the following entry among the marriages:

John Hall, gentleman, and Susanna Shaxpere. This is the first, and well-nigh the only contemporary notice of Hall. Who he was, and whence he came, the reasons which induced him to settle at Stratford, and, indeed, almost everything connected with his personal history, are all hidden in that singular obscurity which seems to envelop all the surroundings of Shakespeare. With the exception of a few brief notices in the Corporation Records relating to his holding the office of Bailiff, we hear nothing more of him until after his death, when one of his many manuscript case-books came into the hands of Dr. Cooke, of Warwick, who translated it from the professional Latin, and published it in 1659, under the title of "Select Observations upon English Bodies of Eminent Persons in Desperate Diseases." This singular book, little known and strangely neglected, is of great interest to investigators of Shakespeare's life and times. Nearly all the eminent

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English bodies," of whose patching up and physicking it is the record, were those of Shakespeare's friends and neighbors, and it is the only source from which we may get a glimpse, however slight, of the people among whom his last years were spent. To these last days, indeed, these doleful pages are in some sort the epilogue, for we find here most of the friends and contemporaries of his youth in the sere and yellow leaf journeying peacefully, but for the most part painfully, to the grave, under the pilotage of Dr. Hall. Among his patients we have "Mrs. Hall, of Stratford (my wife), being miserably tormented with the cholic; " Elizabeth Hall ("my only daughter, vexed with tortura oris "); Mrs. Green (most likely the wife of the Town Clerk, who was a relative of the poet); Mrs. Combe (the wife of the Combe to whom Shakespeare left his sword); Mrs. Sadler (his early friend, and god-mother of his daughter Judith); Esquire Underhill (perhaps the former proprietor of New Place), who in these days was miserably tormented by the "running gout," as became an aged justice; and Alderman Tyler, the person whose name was erased from the will, treated for a thoroughly aldermanic complaint, "exceeding heat of tongue." A Mrs. Nash also, probably the wife of Shakespeare's friend, and mother of the Nash who married Hall's daughter, appears in these pages, and several other members of the Combe and Underhill families. The book is nothing more than an ordinary case-book of the period; but in the word or two descriptive of the individual which Hall affixes to each case we are often able to discover the bent of his own mind, and in some measure to reconstruct the society of the neighborhood. There is abundant evidence that his practice lay amongst the best families of the district, and he was often sent for to attend patients living at a great distance. At Compton Wyniates he was in frequent attendance upon the Marquis of Northampton, and even attended him when residing at Ludlow as Warden of the Welsh Marches. At Warwick his principal patients were "Bar onet Puckering," son of Elizabeth's Speaker, of the same name, very learned, much given to study, of a rare and lean constitution, yet withal phlegmatic," and Lord Brook, the famous friend of Sir Philip Sidney, who appears to have been a confirmed invalid during his latter years of retirement at Warwick. At Clifford, near Stratford, lived the Rainsfords, who are frequently mentioned in this book, notably "my lady Rainsford, beautiful, and of a gallant structure of body." There can be little doubt that Shakespeare would be a frequenter of this house, as Sir Henry Rainsford is said by Aubrey to have been a great friend to poetry and poets. Drayton mentions in one of his letters to Drummond of Hawthornden, that he is accustomed to spend three months of every summer at Clifford, and again alludes to it in the "Polyolbion" as,

... dear Clifford's seat, the place of health and sport, Which many a time hath been the muse's quiet port. Another patient of great consideration with Hall was Esquire Beaufou, of Guy's Cliff, "whose name I have always cause to honor." His worst illness was caused by “eating great quantity of cream at the end of his supper, about the age of seventy." His wife, the Lady Beaufou, was "godly and honest, being of a noble extract." At Walcot, in Oxfordshire, he had a good patient in Lady Jenkinson, who was probably the widow of the Sir Anthony Jenkinson who was twice sent by Elizabeth as ambassador to Russia. Other patients residing in or near Stratford were Mrs. Harvey, “very religious; " the Lady Johnson, " fair, pious, chaste; " Mr. Drayton, "an excellent poet," treated for a tertian, and dosed with a pleasant mixture, which “wrought both upwards and downwards;" Mistress Woodward, "a maid, very witty and well bred, yet gibbous;" Mr. Fortescue, "catholic, a great drinker, of a very good habit of body, sanguine, very fat; " Mr. Trap, the Puritan curate of Stratford," for his piety and learning second to none."

The case of George Quiney is one of the most interesting in the book. He was the son of Shakespeare's old friend Richard, the writer of the one extant letter addressed to Shakespeare (asking for the loan of "xxlb."), and the

brother of Thomas, who married the poet's second day In 1624 he was curate of Stratford, and became Dr. patient for "grievous cough and gentle feaver, bein weak" - in other words, he appears to have been last stage of a galloping consumption. The medical our day let us off with a few doses per diem, and a p potion at night, but in Quiney's time the doctor was a from whom no hour, or even meal, was free. T happy young man was physicked indeed. In the n he took a warm emulsion fasting; followed after br by a hydromel, and at night by another emulsion an At dinner they put saffron into his sauce, “because able for the brest," and musk into his wine, "to c rate the heart." His head was shaved, and an plaster" of twenty-eight ingredients applied to besides all this, he was dosed with small messes of and tragacanth made into a paste and taken "lying back, to the end it may dissolve itself." Under th ment the patient ultimately died, and Hall dismis with the remark that "he was a man of good wit, e tongues, and very learned," which proves at any ra there was one man of culture amongst the Stratfor men. From this specimen it will be seen that our practice was of the heroic type. Nature, accordin theory, was not a friend to be gently entreated and but an enemy to be fiercely wrestled with and co In common with most practitioners of his time. some very nasty and coarse medicines. He oft "juyce of goose-dung" and frog-spawn water as to one of his favorite cataplasms was, "R, a swallow straw, sticks, dung, and all." Powdered human even human fat are strongly recommended, and quently prescribes a restorative made from sn earth-worms. Medicine at this period was in a transition, and the old remedies, based for the m upon the doctrine of sympathies and corresponder held their own against the new and better practic acknowledged no authority but experiment and obs In turning over the pages of this book we cannot struck by the great prevalence of fevers and agues the varieties are mentioned by Hall, such as spotted fever," "erratic fever," the "ungaric fe "new fever," and tertians and quotidians of mar and as a result of these, probably, we continually cases of "hypochondriac melancholy." If the cas book are to be taken as fairly representative, it fol the popular ideal of the land of Shakespeare must erably modified. Stratford was no bucolic paradi faced yokels, but a town of lean and melancholy a very nursery of Hamlets, Timons, and Jacques ever free from

... burning fevers, agues pale and faint; Life-poisoning pestilence, and frenzies wood; Surfeits, imposthumes, grief, and damned des

It is, perhaps, worth notice that no great poe frequently employed images derived from these The physicist of the future who, upon some advan of Mr. Buckle's thesis, will expound to our gran various causes which led up to that most wonder phenomena, Shakespeare, will no doubt have mu about the influence of locality in producing th melancholy which, in place and out of place, see vade every page of his writings. There is little Hall would be Shakespeare's attendant during hi ness, although we have no account of it in this entries in which unfortunately do not commence the year after his death, although it is by no mea that Shakespeare's case would have been give doctor is very chary of recording his failures. Bu Shakespeare's apothecary or surgeon? A pock Hall's is said to have once been in the possession in which there was a statement that his name wa but in another place corrected to Court. Now am patients we find both "John Nason, of Stratford. and" Mrs. Grace Court, wife to my apothecary." days the lancet had scarcely been divorced from

so probably both names are correct, Court being the apothecary, and Nason acting as surgeon or blood-letter. We are told by Ward, afterwards Vicar of Stratford, and also at the same time practising as a physician -a not uncommon conjunction of offices in the seventeenth centurythat Shakespeare died of a fever, contracted at a merry meeting with his friends Drayton and Ben Jonson. In that year (1616) we find from the entries in the Parish Register that the fever was unusually active in Stratford, and it is probable, therefore, that we may acquit the feasting of any share in the poet's death. In the autumn of 1632 the fever again became terribly busy; in Hall's words, “ killing almost all that it did infect," and the doctor himself nearly fell a victim to it. From the way in which his disorder was treated, in the first instance by himself, and afterwards, as he grew worse, by a friendly physician from Warwick and which was, in fact, the routine pratice of the period we may gather a pretty accurate idea of the last hours in this world of that bright but saddened and world-worn spirit - inhabiter of that most eminent of all "eminent English bodies," which seventeen years before had lain burning and tossing in the same house, probably in the same room. The battle commenced in the usual manner, by bleeding: "8 oz. from the liver-vein ;" and was followed up by active cathartics. Afterwards, at frequent intervals, they gave him a strong decoction of hartshorn, the effect of which naturally made him, as he says, "much macerated and weakened, so that I could not turn myself in bed;" and between the doses of hartshorn he took an electuary, of which the principal ingredient was the famous powder of gems, then much in vogue, and composed of jacinths, smardines, rubies, leaf-gold, and red coral. At night he swallowed potions of diascordium and syrup of poppies, and in the morning more cathartics to drive away the little life still left. The heart gradually sinking, a plaster of musk and aromatics was applied to the breast; and then, the poor weakened brain wandering, and the troubled spirit ready to pass the threshold, a pigeon was cut open, and its raw flesh applied warm to the soles of his feet, in the expectation that the vital magnetism of the bird would draw away the humors from the head. And then! In Shakespeare's case, we know how it ended; but Dr. Hall, who must have had the constitution of a horse, recovered.

The book entirely corroborates the well-known and persistent Stratford tradition that the immediate descendants of Shakespeare were Puritans, and therefore inclined to hold the writings of their illustrious relative in little respect. Dr. Hall was certainly a Puritan of a very pronounced type. The word "bodies" upon his title-page seems to imply a reservation as to souls which savors of this school, and the book abounds in the pious phrases which at that time were certain shibboleths of the sect. Cooke, the editor, tells us that "he was in great fame for his skill far and near; and this I take to be a great sign of his ability, that such who spare not for cost, and they who have more than ordinary understanding, nay, such as When hated him for his religion, often made use of him." Dowdall visited Stratford in 1693, the earliest pilgrim who has left an account of his visit, he made friends with the parish clerk, who was then upwards of eighty years old. While viewing the church, the old man pointed to Shakespeare's tomb, and said emphatically, "He was the best of his family!" This has always seemed to us the most expressive testimony, and, from the old town gossip's point of view, speaks volumes, plainly telling of a bright period of generous living at the New Place, too soon followed by a time of darkness, when cakes and ale were not.

John Hall died in November, 1635. By his nuncupative will, made on the day of his death, he left his "study of books" and amongst these, unless they had undergone a similar sifting to that bestowed upon Don Quixote's, would be the priceless Shakespeare Library—to his sonin-law Nash, to dispose of them as you see good,” and, 1 Diary of the Rev. John Ward, Vicar of Stratford-upon-Avon. Edited by Severn. London, 1839. Dr. Ward, like Hall, left behind him a number of MS. case-books.

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in striking contrast to the indifference displayed by his great father-in-law, exhibits a laudable anxiety for his literary progeny. "As for my manuscripts, I would have given them to Mr. Boles, if he had been here, but forasmuch as he is not here present, you may, son Nash, burn them, or do with them what you please." Such is the "Macbeth" " and wondrous diversity of human nature, "Othello" are dismissed without a word to the tender mercies of ignorant players, and still more ignorant printers, or, for the matter of that, to the chances of utter oblivion; but Dr. Hall, upon his bed of death, is troubled about his poor little case-books. The way in which the present book came to be published is detailed by Cooke in an address to the reader prefixed to the first edition, but omitted in the succeeding impressions. At the beginning of the Civil Wars, probably in 1642, Cooke, then quite a young man, was acting as surgeon to the Roundhead troop who were keeping the bridge at Stratford, and quartered with him was "a mate allied to the gentleman who wrote the observations." This young man invited Cooke to New Place to see the books left by Dr. Hall. Mrs. Hall showed him the books, and then said "she had some [other] books left by one that professed physic with her husband, for some money. I told her that if I liked them I would give her the money again." Mrs. Hall then "brought them forth, amongst which there was this, with another of the author's, both intended for the press. I being acquainted with Mr. Hall's hand, told her that one or two of them were her husband's, and showed them to her. She denied, I affirmed, till I perceived she began to be offended, and at last I returned her the money.' This is the only scrat, of intelligence, save the inscription upon her monumend which time has left us about Shakespeare's daughter, and it must be allowed that it does not show her in a pleasant light. Mistress Hall was certainly wise in a worldly sense, as well as "wise to salvation." We may, perhaps, however, derive from the incident a consolatory inference. The tradition-mongers have always delighted to rack our imaginations with visions of the burning of Shakespeare's manuscripts at the hands of a Puritanic and unsympathetic kindred. The fair bargainer of the above scene was not if there the woman to dispose of her father's manuscripts without a proper consideration, and the probability seems to be that Heminge and Condell would get them all. But we must not be led into doing injustice to Mrs. Hall. It is quite possible that Cooke may have been mistaken in the inference which he evidently intends us to draw. We know that it is quite possible for even the largest-hearted and most sympathetic of women to be a dead hand at a bargain, and after all there is no crime in desiring to change a number of musty little manuscripts into current coin of the realm. Mrs. Hall's tombstone in Stratford Church asks us

were any

To weepe with her that wept with all, . That wept, yet set herselfe to chere Them up with comforts cordiall;

which would hardly have been said of a narrow-minded

woman.

We have endeavored in vain to discover some trace of Hall's parentage or extraction. His name does not occur upon the Register of the College of Physicians, or upon those of the Universities, and, as Cooke tells us that he was a good French scholar and had travelled, it is probable that his degree was from Leyden cr Paris. There was a John Hall who practised at Maidstone about 1565, and published a translation of Lanfranc's famous "Ars Chirurgica." This Hall also published some poetry of a religious cast, and was a very decided Puritan. Is it possible that our Dr. Hall could have been a son or nephew of his? There is certainly a curious intellectual relationship in the style of the two men.

It is amusing to discover how the real state of affairs at Stratford, during the last years of Shakespeare's life, differed from that which has been pictured for us by the sentimental biographers who have surrounded the poet in his retirement with troops of admiring worshippers. The