into womanhood; but her noble cheek was pale, and her beautiful lips compressed, and her rich tresses hung down on the loosened doublet and unbuckled belt, all dripping and dishevelled with the snow. The hostess seemed to understand her part; for restraining all needless loquacity, she respectfully assisted the young lady to exchange her dress, and then silently retired.

"The saints forgive me!" was Magdalene's faltered exclamation when she found herself alone; "the saints forgive me, if there be sin in this deed! But what sin can there be? Is not Valentine Chetwynd my equal in birth and rank?-is he not the paragon of manly goodness?—and may we not look that this deadly feud will be staunched by these irrevocable measures? I will hope," she continued, her eye kindling and her cheek glowing, "true, Sir Humphrey is fierce and terrible-but he will hear reason, at least he must listen to the king, for not even my father is higher in Henry's favour than Sir Valentine Chetwynd. His Grace will joy to see those bitter quarrels extinguished for ever, wherein he hath so often mediated in vain! My brother John is prejudiced, but he loves me well; and my mother-ah, my poor mother, I fear me, this will fall heaviest on thee."

Magdalene had risen from her seat under the excitement of her meditations; but the thought of her motherher gentle-her confiding mothersuffering at once under her loss, and the too probable harshness of Sir Humphrey, who had been austere as a husband as well as father, dispelled at once all her bright visions, and she had sunk on the huge settle in an attitude of the deepest despondence, when Valentine re-entered, (having discarded his woman's weeds,) and hastened to her side.

of clear brown, eloquent with noble blood, that mantled over them.

"What, Magdalene, all amort? In faith I have made some error, and have stolen-save the mark! stolen my Lady's Page, who trembles at the discipline of the Buttery-hatch.”

Magdalene's fine face was once more relumed at the sight and voice of her lover; and, smiling as she pointed to her disguise, asked:

"And at what Buttery-hatch is the truant Page to be disciplined? Hold the broad towers of Ingestre such gear? By yea and nay, Valentine, I will not farther in this mummery!"

"Be satisfied, my beautiful! retain it but for this night, and yon moon"-(he said, as the planet emerging from a cloud played through the lozenged casement and showed the snowy steeples and houses of the city,)—" yon moon shall not be half so brilliant as the mistress of Ingestre to-morrow. Thou fearest not a distant journey, though at this wild season, if it will place us beyond the arm of Sir Humphrey's vengeance?"

"With Valentine at my side, I can fear nothing; and an angry father is less to be braved than a withering winter'!”

"Trust me, my beloved, we tarry at Ingestre only till holy church hath linked us for ever. We will then speed to London, where my rank as gentle man usher to the king will obtain me ready access to his grace. To him our story shall be told; and doubt not, that ere long Magdalene of Ingestre shall be so brave in the court sunshine, that not even a father's ire shall venture to interpose a cloud!"

Lichfield were wafted through the sunny air, over woods and fields of sparkling snow, to the lofty courts of Pype-Hall. The great bell in the cupola was ringing aloud; horses were in the outer

quadrangle, richly caparisoned, and snorting with impatience, tossed incessantly the long feathers on their chanfrons, and pawed the clattering pavement. Pursuivants, men-at-arms, and other domestics, were bustling to and fro; the grooms stamped their feet and blew their fingers, benumbed with the cold, as they stood by the horses' reins, and the baying of the hounds from the kennels, was answered by the screams and jangled bells of the falcons in their mews. The broad banner of Stanley, impaling Lee, floated statelily over the buildings, flinging its gorgeous blazon from a staff of pine, into the blue frosty sky, while the mantle of snow, overlaid by a powerless sun, lay like a golden roof upon the deep and frowning pile.

Sir Humphrey, his family, and their numerous guests, were to distinguish the great festival of Christmas Day, by attending high mass in the Minster, in observance of the conditions by which the knight was permitted to have a private chapel at Pype-Hall for ordinary services. The company were assembled in the baronial hall, whose immense volumes of tapestry were worked with the dazzling scenes of courtly magnificence taken from the book of Daniel -there the guests

"Saw men portrayed on the wall; the images of the Chaldæans portrayed with vermillion, girded with girdles upon their loins, exceeding in dyed attires upon their heads, all of them princes to look to, after the manner of the Babylonians of Chaldæa."*

The table of dais displayed a weighty profusion of medieval delicacies, which nothing but its massive pillars of oak, carved in the figures of eight bulls rampant, could have supported. Capacious flagons of malmsey, claret, and mead, and richly sculptured vessels of foaming ale, were intermingled with savory collops of veal and beef, dishes of salt and fresh water fish, buttered eggs, honey, and various preparations of milk spiced and sweetened. Canisters piled up with loaves of warm bread, rose like towers here and there, interspersed with the most delicate flawns, manchets, and almond biscuits. The yule-dough, or paste images displayed every where their fanciful figures; while, central and pre-eminent, a gigantic boar's-head displayed his rosemary chaplet, the ruddy orange in his jaws, and his highly gilded tusks. Two tables on each

Ezekiel, xxiii. 14.

side the hall, extending at right angles from the dais, were occupied each in their rank by the various domestics of the knight and his visitors: their fare, though of inferior quality, was equally abundant; plum-porridge, Christmaspies in the shape of cradles, yule-cakes, &c. &c. Mighty boughs of ivy, holly, and yew, each with its green scarlet, and pink berries, were mingled with box and laurel, and smaller but more precious clusters of the misletoe, whose yellow fruit and dull leaves looked all the ghastly mysteries of the Druids they once adorned.

In the midst of a desultory conversation on the sports of the preceding night, Sir Humphrey, glancing round the table, suddenly exclaimed,

"How now?-where is Madge ?— Where is your daughter, my Lady Stanley? She is not wont to be a loiterer either at meal or mass-yet I see her not!"

The lady turned pale with various but guiltless fears as her husband spoke, when, following the direction of his broad fierce eye, she saw that the beantiful Magdalene was not at the morning meal. Sir Humphrey was a man in the fruitful vigour of life; his person was moulded in all the gigantic symmetry of a Farnese Hercules:

No airy elegance that fancy sees
Float in the dance, or futter in the breeze,
No Athos Inboured to the form of man ;
No shapeless mass of huge colossal plan-
But true proportions of resistless might,
Heroic mien, and lineaments, and height.+

His face was intended by nature to be handsome; the light hair, the broad cast of the lips, the fair and ruddy-tinted forehead, the aquiline nose, the refined complexion, were all there, but they were counteracted to an extraordinary brows, the former being as unusually degree by black hair and black eyelarge as the latter were bushy. When added, that his passions had no bounds, to this physiognomical anomaly it is

"And where his frown of hatred darkly fell, Hope withering fled, and Mercy sigh'd fare

well!"

and the noble hall of Aston to his ancestral possessions,) was a thin, pale female, whose gentle tones and timid eye required encouragement even from those of milder mood; but which, beneath the stern manner and imperious voice of her lord, habitually quailed into helpless terror.

Lady Stanley began faltering forth her answer to her turbulent husband, "that in the hurry of attending her guests, she had forgotten to arouse Magdalene."

A violent burst of invective from Sir Humphrey cut short her reply: pale and trembling, she sate silent. The guests looked at each other in painful embarrassment; a female domestic was summoned, and as she crossed the gallery overlooking the opposite end of the hall, every eye and ear followed her footsteps; soon after she had disappeared, a faint scream was heard, and rushing back and leaning over the carved pinnacles of the gallery, the maiden proclaimed that Mistress Magdalene's chamber was empty, and that her bed had never been pressed the preceding night.

Sir Humphrey's face began rapidly to darken with its fiendish expression. The porter was summoned. Felix Redmayne entered the hall; a beautiful robust yeoman apparently about fourand-twenty, with the family badge of the eagle and the child wrought on his shoulders and loins. As he approached the dais, a cloud of timidity and awkwardness overcast his bluff but gallant features.

"Mistress Magdalene," he said, "had risen before dawn, and had parted for Lichfield, having vows to pay by the will of her patroness St. Magdalene, in the meadows north-west of the city, and purposed rejoining the company in St. Peter's chapel at the Minster."

Language would fail to describe the paroxysm of fury that dilated and inflamed Sir Humphrey's countenance, impeding his very utterance at these tidings.

66

Purposed?" he at length roared out, purposed a most maidenly purpose, and a delicate confidant by St. Giles she hath chosen for her purpose; and a worthy warden I have chosen for my walls. Villain thy life shall answer this!"

"So please you, Sir Humphrey, it was your own order that both gates and drawbridge should be open during the night (as was ever your wont on Christmas Eve) to all outgoers and in

All instantly arose, and two or three of the most distinguished among them succeeded with difficulty in partially appeasing the furious knight, who at length ended by ordering the porter into close custody.

"To horse and forward," he exclaimed, "or we shall be late at mass ! We must not let this errant damosel suppose us more laggards in holy things than herself! But by the crest of my father!"-he champed his teeth as he spoke,-" by the crest of my father, she shall say Nones Vespers and Complin in her own closet, and that fasting too!"

The whole company now passed forth into the quadrangle, and amidst much marvel and conjecture mounting their horses and ascending their litters, filed off through the sounding gateway, and ere long the stately pile of Northburgsgate, surmounted by its magnificent tower, admitted them into the Minster Close.

It was some hours afterwards that the burly form of Sir Humphrey Stanley was seen advancing through the snowy lane, leading to the retired precincts of Saint Magdalene's Well. Every tree was so thickly and dazzlingly silvered with incrustations of snow, as to resemble with their arching boughs the crystalline colonnades of a fairy grotto; and when the knight reached the sainted spot, nothing could be more striking than the contrast between the chilly brilliance and breathless silence of the scene, and the tornado of passions that tumultuously agitated its sole spectator! A carved basin, simply laced with open wheelwork and quatrefoils, received the diamond element through a stone rosette in the pedestal that supported the graceful shrine and effigy of Saint Magdalene; bursting thence, the little stream marked its course by a sweeping track of inky blackness through the jagged snow, till it lost itself in the neighbouring brook: the birds flit'el hither and thither, silent as phantoms; and there was a profound hush, only interrupted by the puny tinkle of the well, the sleepy breeze hissing through the hedgerows, the partridges from the dell, or the cold clear notes of the robin, as with large black eye and brown and

crimson vest he perched fearlessly on a pinnacle of the Fountain. In this place of peace, sanctified as it was by the holiest and most beneficent rites of a beautiful superstition, stood one who, if the earth had cleft beneath his feet, and sent forth the visible arch-enemy himself, would have fronted him in the fierceness of his own passions. A single glance sufficed to shew him, that not a footstep had displaced the pure and sparkling surface round the well. The certainty of his daughter's flight was frightfully aggravated by vague but fierce suspicions; and while he writhed beneath their influence, it might have been supposed that some maniac was venting his horrible insanities.

We dare not detail this explosion of a father's anger and a rival's hate. The agony of the first surmise gradually succeeded by a half choaked enumeration of every real or fancied cause for hatred which the Chetwynds had inflicted on him, and this blazing forth into threats and imprecations only subsiding in the deliberate pitiless purpose of revenge, we dare not, if we could display.

When Sir Humphrey alighted at his hall, the silent fury in his face terrified the old butler; but when, in a calm, unnatural tone, he commanded that Felix Redmayne, the porter, should be brought before him, the old man read such a terrible meaning in his master's eye, that, forgetting all personal considerations, he flung himself on his knees at Sir Humphrey's feet, exclaiming—

"Oh, for holy Mary's sake, Sir Knight!-for His sake, who came down to save sinners, let not blood stain thine hands on this blessed festival!"

"Peace, slave! I will only take so much of his blood as shall purge his falsehood from his veins. Bring him up I say. Bid Bartholomew bring his scourge, and let the cook and his assistant attend."

So saying, Sir Humphrey ascended the steps into the hall. Thither Felix was conducted, and as he entered Sir Humphrey said

"Thou hast done such good service, knave, that it were wronging thee to keep back thy wages a single hour. Untruss, man!-Be ready to hold him, fellows," he added to two stout men, who now advanced ;-" you Styche!" to the cook, a truculent looking personage, prepare our badge;-and you, Amos, scourge him till his bones are bare ???

Felix, while untrussing his points, and taking off his doublet and shirt, turned an unshrinking eye upon his stern master, and said, firmly

"Sir Humphrey Stanley! you may scourge the life out of me; but every stripe shall make me rejoice that the young lady, as they tell me, is clean escaped from such a tyrant father!"

Sir Humphrey only replied by a signal to two of the servants, who, with evident reluctance, approached Felix; the poor fellow put an arm round each of their necks, and was held by the hands in that posture: and while undergoing a flagellation too severe to be mentioned, he seemed like one asleep, or in the act of an affectionate caress, so entirely did his manhood conceal his sufferings. This punishment over, the two men turned him on his back upon their knees—a third held his feet, while the cook, approaching with a small iron, figured like an eagle and child, stamped it hissing on the yeoman's naked chest, which broad and brawney never flinched from its burning salute. The deep drawn breath, however, and the perspiration starting from every pore of white skin, betrayed in spite of himself the unfortunate porter's agony. A suit of clothes resembling the common dress of a peasant was then put upon the tortured Felix ; and, without further ceremony, he was thrust forth from the gates of the manor hall.

This savage punishment was witnessed by Sir Humphrey, not only with a pitiless eye, but with the mien of one disdainful of the paltry revenge he was taking on a vassal, and looking to. more eminently horrible tokens of his rage.

Redmayne had scarcely strength to walk; but his limbs, in spite of his pains, were of the most masculinestrength; and his heart, his courageous heart, no slavish punishment could touch. Heroic was his step and mien, till he found himself beyond the sight of his cruel master; and it was not till the last battlement of Pype Hall was hidden by the wintry oak trees from his view, that he yielded to his excruciating torments, and sank exhausted at the threshold of a large wooden gate, leading into the yard of a farm or homestal of apparent magnitude.

To be continued.