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could find anybody who was willing to come. For himself, Jonas had slept in the wagon three nights out of four since the day when he left Lynn.

CHAPTER XV.

Val.-The Lady is alone!

Rachel Fredet to General MacKaye.
"Coffins; Monday.

"MY DEAR GENERAL: You are very kind and thoughtful. But I cannot leave these people till we know if they are to live or die. Certainly I am safe here. At the Harbour I think we can hold on. At the least I must

Val.-I said she was alone

Berth.
-And weak, I said.
Val.-When is man strong until he feels alone?
Colombe's Birthday.

WHEN the Doctor came the next day, Rachel saw at once that his face was serious. Had this been after he saw his patients, she would have supposed that they were the cause. But, before he dismounted, his expression revealed his anxiety. He went directly into the house, with scarcely a word; and then, speaking of and to Mrs. Topin, gave the most encouraging opinion of her position. She scarcely understood, she scarcely seemed to care, and he then hurried from the room, beckoned to Knowles, who was in the door-way of the wood-shed, and walked with him and Rachel away from the house.

"The post is broken up," said he. "The General has a telegram within an hour; we move for the Ferry in the morning and shall be before Richmond on Friday. There will not be a blue coat nor a brass button in the Harbour to-morrow night."

"This is sudden!" said Rachel. And she felt through and through the loneliness. of her position. "The General is distressed," said the Doctor, very seriously. "There is no other word.

me.

He rode a mile on the way with He said he knew he was responsible for your being here; that your Board would never have sent you unless there were a post here; and his most earnest advice is, that you leave with the command."

"I hardly see," said Rachel. "You know I am under orders too; and I should be rather mean in reporting to my chiefs that I had run away from the very duty I was sent to do. Besides here are these people. Clearly I cannot leave them. Say to General MacKaye-no, I will write to him." And she took out her pocket letter-case, and wrote in pencil to the General.

"I am afraid," said she with undisguised feeling, when she had read it to the Doctor, and as she folded it, "I am afraid that this is the end of a very, very pleasant winter."

"God bless you, indeed," said the Doctor, moved more than he liked to say by the girl's firmness. "It cannot be long before we shall meet again.”

"Take Richmond and come up the valley home. We will come out in procession and scatter flowers."

"Ye need not be troubled 'bout leavin' on her here," said Jonas, by way of relieving the seriousness of the parting. "Guess a' shall stay round here myself a few days; a' calculated to prospect along in the valley, 'n' ef they 's any chance a' may locate here' Anyway shan't be fur away."

The Doctor turned to the good fellow and bade him good-bye; then apologized again for the shortness of his visit, gave his last directions for the sick, and was gone.

Jonas Knowles occupied his leisure for the rest of that afternoon in cutting two of the longest saplings he could find, fastening them end to end, for a flag-staff, and reeving the running tackle by which in the morning he could display the Union colors on the knoll above the house. With the flag itself, as need hardly be said, his wagon was provided.

"Guess they won't show no colors down there wen the army's gone," said he. "Guess they won't come up here to meddle with ourn!" And the next day, as the little corps filed by in the valley road, two miles below them, the Doctor, as he tried to point out Topin's to the General, could see Rachel's

Rachel had spent her afternoon in writing a careful despatch to her "Advisory and Executive Board of Correspondence." She also wrote to Mrs. Templeman. Her view was that the school had better be maintained; that, if peace were at hand, as she hoped, it could be enlarged. She ventured to ask that its enlargement might be determined on, in advance, and that another teacher might be detailed to this service. To Mrs. Templeman she said that she wished this other teacher might be Miss Jane Stevens. Everybody had confidence in her judgment, and with the new order, Miss Jane Stevens would not be so much needed in Georgetown. Rachel also dwelt on her hope that as soon as the Senate adjourned Mrs. Templeman would come in the early spring into the valley and see her

"Sit on a cushion and sew up a seam."

So little did Rachel permit herself to look doubtfully on the future, and so definitely did she arrange for its fulfilling her best prophecies.

So soon as the army left they were indeed alone. No Doctor from day to day; nobody but Tirah, and Tirah had little enough to tell but the poorest village gossip. Elder Bottle had determined with Gen. MacKaye's consent to remain. He and his wife had, at Rachel's request, moved into the schoolhouse; but, as had been determined, the school was not to be opened so soon as Monday week. The General had, of course, taken with him the army telegraph; and when the command left, there was, of course, an end to the regular mail. News from the outside came in the wildest and most irregular rumors. A series of such rumors, declaring the most amazing successes of the confederate arms, such as the capture of gunboats, the death of General Butler in battle, the capture of the Federal

Meanwhile Mrs. Topin's second eruption, with its horrid accompaniments of fever, headache, and absolute prostration, passed happily by. Gusty's proved light, beyond Rachel's fondest hopes. The three other children, free as colts all day on the hillside, and separated absolutely from the house at night, never showed a sign of the disease. Whether they had been protected in infancy by vaccination, or whether some miracle tempered the wind to such shorn lambs, Rachel did not know. On the last Saturday of the school vacation, the last rags of Mrs. Topin's clothing and Gusty's were triumphantly burned by the indomitable Jonas. Both she and Gusty were dressed spick and span in blue calicos of the most approved make of the Lynn Sanitary Aid Society.

"Guess ye can run the machine yourself now, Miss Topin," said Jonas. Anyway, shall be round myself every day or two; ef a' take that ere mill priverlidge at Lynch's ye 'll see me offen, ye will. 'N' Miss Fredet here 'n' the nigger gal will be up offen, ye know. Guess ye wont be lonely." Jonas forgot that the poor woman was well trained to a lonely life, long ago.

For Rachel, she returned with Tirah to the Harbour, and she had hardly been in her snug little home an hour before Miss Jane Stevens arrived. Miss Jane Stevens and her companions in the lumber-wagon brought the dreadful news, which changed all life in the Harbour, as eventually it did in the country, that on Good Friday Wilkes Booth had killed ABRAHAM LINCOLN! Even the sulkiness of Laurens Harbour, at a tragedy so terrible, did not dare to cheer.

Ir is a common notion that the Protestant church of the Anglo Saxon people dates from the reign of Henry VIII. in the six teenth century. That it was born of his imperious lust, his determination to have from his own compliant court a divorce which the pope of Rome would not give him, is an idea which has been sedulously cultivated for ecclesiastical reasons. The age of the Roman Catholic church attracts many who do not know that religious liberty is as old as ecclesiastical usurpation. The popular errors on this subject have been often corrected, but as often reasserted; and the true history of the Protestant Reforma tion must needs be told again and again, so long as ignorance mistakes effects for causes, and prejudice attributes a great awakening to a court intrigue.

The English Reformation was a threefold one-political, ecclesiastical and religious,―a reformation in the relations of church and state, a reformation in the organization and character of the church, a reformation in the religious opinions and life of the nation. Let us trace them separately.

I. Common people marry for love; kings marry for reasons of state. Henry VIII., coming to the throne at 18 years of age, married Catharine, the daughter of the king of Spain, his brother Arthur's widow, and six years his senior. The marriage was none of his own seeking. He was betrothed by his father to the Spanish widow of eighteen, when he was but twelve. Tradition says he remonstrated; if this is any palliation of his subsequent infidelity let him have the full benefit of it. Spain was a great nation. France was great too, and England's greatest rival. By this marriage Henry VII. and the English statesmen hoped to cement an alliance between England and Spain, which should aid England to humble France. But no politician is sufficiently prophetic to foretell with accuracy the future, and even the plans of the great Thomas Wolsey, Archbishop of York, chancellor, cardinal, legate, miscarried. Politics chang-.

ed. The friendship of Spain was no longer desired. Catharine of Aragon, after eighteen years of married life, had no son living. The Wars of the Roses were fresh in men's recollections. The people of England had dread of a disputed succession. Henry himself shared in the universal dread. The reign of his father had been disquieted by perpetual revolts, and his own was not free from them. Catharine had never succeeded in winning her husband's love; perhaps had never tried. She was haughty; so was he; the Castilian pride and the Tudor pride were too near of kin to mate well together. Faithful she certainly was, through good report and evil report, for better and for worse; but loving? Concerning that history can tell us but little. The reasons of state no longer held the king to his wife; they even strengthened his desire for a change. Whatever virtues history may impute to him, constancy is not one of them. It is doubtful whether reasons of state alone would ever have led him to seek for a divorce; but there was another reason. This king, whom only one knight in England could match in the tournament, and who drew with ease the strongest bow, was not strong to bend his desires to his judgment. This statesman, whose papers are declared by his eulogists to be unsurpassed by those of Wolsey or of Cromwell, who was his own engineer,inventing improvements in artillery and new constructions in ship-building with workman-like understanding, knew not how to engineer himself. This theologian, who had earned the title of "defender of the faith" by the vigor of his reply to Luther, was abler in defending theology than in maintaining his own moral integrity. He fell in love with a maid of honor to Queen Catherine, Anne Boleyn, and before his selfwilled impetuosity all considerations of prudence and of honor fled away.

It is difficult to give a judicial estimate of King Henry VIII.; it is still more difficult justly to estimate the character of Anne Boleyn. It is doubtful whether any character in history, save that of Mary Queen of

Scots, has been the subject of more violent controversy or more widely variant opinions. The Roman Catholic historians have represented her as a young woman of the most unscrupulous immorality, the daughter of a mother as designing as herself, perpetually occupied with low intrigues with her servants, and cunning enough to estimate the strength of the royal passion, and to turn it to good account in compelling the dazzled king to create a vacancy at his side, in order to make her his wife. The Protestant writers, on the other hand, describe her as virtuous and modest, daughter of a virtuous and modest mother, holding with the reformer Latimer frequent consultations for the interests of Protestantism and the protection of Protestant believers, and maintaining her honor at the court and accepting the royal offer of marriage only after the highest ecclesiastical dignitaries of the realm had decreed the illegality of the previous marriage. They even differ in the description of her person. According to Protestant tastes, she was the very perfection of love liness; to the ancient Catholic's eye, her complexion was yellow, she had a gag tooth, six fingers on one hand and a tumor under her chin. Her extant portraits are almost as dissimilar as the verbal descriptions. In some she is small featured, plump almost to fatness, pretty but without character; in others she is portrayed with large features, great, deep eyes, tender, pathetic, but marred by a kind of unwomanly cunning. Her history for our own purposes may be soon told. She was the second daughter of Sir Thomas Boleyn, a gentleman of noble family but of moderate fortune. She spent the eleven most formative years of her life, from seven to eighteen, in Paris, " in the worst school in Europe," says Froude; "in one of the best," says D'Aubigne; in a school, however, in which she could not have failed to come in contact with much of social life to which no Christian parent in our day would willingly submit his daughter. Even D'Aubigne recognizes the possible influence of her French education upon her life and character.* She entered the English court and became an unmistakable favorite of the English D'Aubigne's Calvin, p. 127.

king. It is impossible for impartial judgment to commend her course. She did not repel his advances. She knew, for all Europe was full of the excitement, that he was seeking a divorce from Queen Catharine. She could hardly have been ignorant that he sought it in order that he might marry her. She could hardly have given him her true woman's affections, for these she had bestowed before upon Henry Percy, son of the Earl of Northumberland. Finally she yielded to the royal persuasions and to her own ambitions. On the 14th of November, 1532, she was privately married to Henry VIII. His previous marriage was not then annulled; not until eleven weeks after did the too compliant Cranmer declare Queen Catharine in contumacy for refusing to appear before the king's court, and the marriage celebrated nearly a quarter of a century before to have been null and void from the beginning. Christendom can never give but one answer to the injured Catharine's question: "Alas, my lords," said she," is it now a question whether I be a king's lawful wife or no, when I have been married to him almost twenty years and no objection made? "* Christendom may well doubt the truth of the accusations by which King Henry brought the unhappy Boleyn to the scaffold, three years after his marriage to her, that he might put in her place another maid of honor, but it can never wholly acquit her of being accessory to the flagrant crime which Henry VIII. committed against Catharine of Aragon.

It is not necessary for us to narrate the tedious and profitless negotiations through which Henry first sought to obtain from the pope the desired decree of divorce; the delays, the palterings and the evasions with which the pontiff, afraid to offend either the English or the Spanish king, sought to escape the dilemma in which he was placed.— and the lordly bearing of the queen, strong in her Castilian pride and refusing every suggestion of compromise, as a suggestion of the evil one. It is equally needless for us to trace the subsequent career of Henry VIII. with his successive queens and his successive favorites. It is enough for us

*Strickland's Queens of England, vol. 99.

here to note the first great fact in the English Reformation. The king, unable to obtain a divorce from the pope, declared that henceforth for him and for his people there should be no pope. He won from the clergy, by threats, the title of "Supreme head of the church," and from the parliament a statute forbidding any appeal from the archbishop's court to the Roman pontiff. He laid his claim for divorce before the new archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, who had himself discovered, perhaps we ought to say devised, the ground on which that claim was based; and when, in 1535, the pope finally excommunicated the king for his rebellion, he defied the papal decree, and the people, the clergy and the church sustained him in that defiance. The political reformation of the church was complete. From that day to this England has never acknowledged any ecclesiastical authority in the Roman pontiff.

II. But this political reformation could not have been accomplished but for the moral reformation which both preceded and accompanied it. If the church of Rome had not lost its power over the people, it could not have been defied by the king. And in the beginning of the sixteenth century the Romish church had lost its moral power. The priests had ceased to be either the wisest or the best portion of society. The moral corruptions of the priesthood, far more than the theoretical corruptions in doctrine, led to the Reformation in Germany. The corruptions were absolutely less but relatively as great in England. Licentiousness and drunkenness were common in monastic institutions. Many of the priests spent their time in hunting, hawking and lounging in the taverns or on the streets. Clergymen held many parishes, and served few or none. Bishops accumulated sees, and did nothing in them. The great church reformer Wolsey was at once Archbishop of York, Bishop of Winchester, Bath and Durham, and Abbot of St. Albans. The celibacy of the clergy affords great temptations and the practice of the confessional affords great opportunities for flagrant immorality. In the beginning of the sixteenth century the

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clergy as a class were utterly demoralized by the system which created such temptations and afforded such opportunities. It was the most corrupt epoch in the history of the church. The restraints of ecclesiastical order were relaxed, the restraints of an enlightened public opinion had not begun to be operative. It was the era of the greatest industry in vice and the least industry in virtue. Who," cried Latimer, "is the most diligent bishop and prelate in all England, that passeth all the rest in the doing of his office? I can tell you, for I know him well. Will ye know who it is? I will tell you. It is the devil. Among all the pack of them that have parishes the devil shall go for my money, for he applyeth his business. Therefore ye unpreaching prelates learn of the devil to be diligent in your office. If ye will not learn of God, for shame learn of the devil."

But if the clergy were remiss in the duties they were not slow in seeking for the emoluments of their offices. Great evil the church courts wrought in the time of Thomas Becket in protecting criminals; in the time of Henry VIII. they had become equally effective in harrying laymen. Any private person was liable to be brought before the ecclesiastical courts on any accusation from heresy to absence from church, or from drunkenness to non-payment of offerings. The penalty was a fine. The court was rarely scrupulous as to the evidence. The recusant was punished with excommunication. There lingers even in our own time, a shadow that falls from this ancient penalty. A Mennonite sect in Pennsylvania last year excommunicated one of its members; his wife was compelled to choose between eternal penalties pronounced against her, and abandoning her excommunicated husband. She chose to cleave to the church and leave her husband. The civil courts awarded to the husband two thousand five hundred dollars in damages against the church which had thus undertaken to separate his wife from him. In Quebec to-day, if a Roman Catholic becomes Protestant, he is compelled in selfprotection to leave the city; for, while kindly relations are maintained between