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"that the wind in past ages, before the modern reign of Man began, was Lord and King of this globe through the weird, mad œons of chaos. Have you not heard it moan at times as if restlessly bewailing its ancient long-lost dominion, sighing a sighing a mournful lament over its vanished greatness? And then, as if in scorn, it spreads its vast wings and careers off into the universe, returning after a brief self-banishment with redoubled fury, wailing, shrieking, wringing airy hands, tearing and destroying what it may not possess, wreaking wild vengeance on usurping Man. But it will have its own again one day, Diney, when the flood of fire from heaven shall have swept human life from off the face of this doomed globe, and the earth shall have been once more abandoned to wind, to fire, to desolation, and to death!"

the horses, through the trouble our

"The earth will last our time," was the rejoinder, growing fainter as descending the slope, passed meadow gate; "and we won't selves about the fate of posterity."

our remote

Ralph and Josceline emerged once more, and as they crossed over to the churchyard the figures of the riders could be still seen ascending the steep height towards the Castle. No time was to be lost, and as the pair entered the church they could hear upon the path the patter of clogs belonging to two old women, who having attained a good

repute for regular churchgoing, failed not to sustain it, in confident expectation of a substantial recognition of their superior merits at Christmas from both "My Lord," and "Pa'son." Luckily for our adventurers old Jimmy, the sexton, stood with his back turned to them pulling away desperately at his two beloved bells, and they had consequently no difficulty in slipping unobserved into the shelter of the tower. Neither did he turn his white head as the old door creaked on its hinges, thanks partly to his deafness, partly to the incessant clanging of his bells. Josceline pulled to the door behind him, and then, climbing the winding stairs till they were out of sight from below, they sat down on the dusty steps, and composed themselves to patient waiting till the final lockingup of the church for the night should leave them free to issue forth and make their desperate venture.

CHAPTER V.

To go

Under the obscure, cold, rotting, wormy ground,
To be nailed down into a narrow place.

SHELLEY.

THE familiar words of the church-prayers could scarcely reach them through the thick masonry of the tower, but the Gregorian chanting sounded strangely weird and plantive, as, echoing down the nave, it reached the place of their concealment, came mounting upwards faint and high, and died above their heads.

A

Josceline was too full of the adventure before him to pay much heed to the sacred strains, but Ralph joined intently in the rite with the unseen worshippers below. curiously vivid impression was upon him that this was the last service in the beloved old church in which he would ever bear a part, and it seemed to him as though, lifted above and walled up from the rest of the congregation, he was already half initiated into some other life than theirs.

When the last "Amen" had died away, there was a brief silence, succeeded by a clattering of feet as the little company dispersed. One of the number was heard to linger, exchanging a few original remarks with Jim Beaviss on the weather and "taties," and then the sexton

stumped along the aisle, closing windows and putting things to rights, with a wheezing cough which seemed to augur that ere long old Jimmy would exchange his small labours in the church for a long holiday with his fathers in the churchyard. It seemed a tedious time to the prisoners in the tower before the leisurely old man departed, but depart he did at last, slamming and doublelocking the door behind him against profane intrusion. Josceline sprang up, brushing from his head a huge spider who had been diligently weaving her web in his locks, and who witnessed his abrupt departure with the sorrowful indignation with which she would have watched a monstrous prize-fly escape her toils. Ralph followed his companion slowly down the winding stair; they were alone in possession of the church.

The few lights had been, of course, extinguished, and night, gathering fast, hid the far end of the chancel in obscurity, and shrouded dimly the outlines of the pulpit, screen, monuments, and hatchments. The font looked like a white, veiled ghost, watching its bereaved kinsfolk put on mourning. One spot alone in all the building was illuminated. The moon, just risen over the neighbouring cottage roofs, looked in through a Norman window facing south, streamed in a long river of quivering light along the nave, and fell on a marble tablet on the opposite wall-a tablet which announced

to all curious sight-seers that beneath lay the family burial-place of the Harolds of Rotherhame. The two moved silently in the direction of this tablet.

The narrow transept in which they now stood was so crowded with monuments that it bore almost the appearance of a mortuary chapel. There were memorials to the dead, representing the vicissitudes of human thought through the course of many centuries. The painted wooden case which held King Ealred's dust; the cross-legged Crusader, with joined hands uttering eternal, stony prayers; the ruffed Elizabethan hero, side by side with his lady, and encompassed by a goodly offspring, invoking fossilised blessings on their parents' unconscious heads; shrouded urns; ample Georgian peers, reposing serenely in arm-chairs, a list of their own virtues at their feet, and above their heads the ghastly symbols of mortality; finally, one or two simple brass crosses, tokens of a revived taste, if not of a reawakened faith. Ralph knew them all by heart, had studied them scores of times from his comfortable pew, as a diversion of thought in the midst of a long afternoon discourse, but he regarded them with other eyes now that he contemplated plunging below, among the long buried subjects of their inscriptions.

"Let us, from respect to my ancestors, make our toilettes before we go down to leave our cards upon them," he said with

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