Meanwhile the corpse of the ejected reprobate oscillated like a pendulum between Sheerness and Gillingham Reach. Now borne by the Medway into the Western Swale, now carried by the refluent tide back to the vicinity of its old quarters, it seemed as though the River god and Neptune were amusing themselves with a game of subaqueous battledore, and had chosen this unfortunate carcass as a marine shuttlecock. For some time the alternation was kept up with great spirit, till Boreas, interfering in the shape of a stiffish" Nor'-wester," drifted the bone (and flesh) of contention ashore on the Shurland domain, where it lay in all the majesty of mud. It was soon discovered by the retainers, and dragged from its oozy bed, grinning worse than ever. Tidings of the god-send were of course carried instantly to the castle, for the Baron was a very great man; and if a dun crow had flown across his property unannounced by the warder, the Baron would have kicked him, the said warder, from the topmost battlement into the bottommost ditch,-a descent of peril, and one which "Ludwig the leaper," or the illustrious Trenk himself, might well have shrunk from encountering.

"An't please your lordship-" said Peter Periwinkle.

"No, villain! it does not please me!" roared the Baron.

His lordship was deeply engaged with a peck of Feversham oysters, -he doted on shellfish, hated interruption at meals, and had not yet despatched more than twenty dozen of the "natives."

"There's a body, my lord, washed ashore in the lower creek," said the seneschal.

The Baron was going to throw the shells at his head; but paused in the act, and said with much dignity,

"Turn out the fellow's pockets!"

But the defunct had before been subjected to the double scrutiny of Father Fothergill and the Clerk of St. Bridget's. It was ill gleaning after such hands; there was not a single marvedi.

We have already said that Sir Ralph de Shurland, Lord of the Isle of Sheppey, and of many a fair manor on the main-land, was a man of worship. He had rights of freewarren, saccage and sockage, cuisage and jambage, fosse and fork, infang theofe and outfang theofe; and all waifs and strays belonged to him in fee simple.

"Turn out his pockets!" said the Knight.

"Please you, my lord, I must say as how they was turned out afore, and the devil a rap 's left."

"Then bury the blackguard!"

"Please your lordship, he has been buried once."

"Then bury him again, and be benediction.

-!" The Baron bestowed a

The seneschal bowed low as he left the room, and the Baron went on with his oysters.

Scarce ten dozen more had vanished when Periwinkle reappeared. "An't please you, my lord, Father Fothergill says as how that it's the Grinning Sailor, and he won't bury him anyhow."

"Oh! he won't-won't he ?" said the Baron. Can it be wondered at that hecalled for his boots?

Sir Ralph de Shurland, Lord of Shurland and Minster, Baron of Sheppey in comitatu Kent, was, as has been before hinted, a very great man. He was also a very little man; that is, he was relatively

great and relatively little, or physically little and metaphorically great,-like Sir Sidney Smith and the late Mr. Bonaparte. To the frame of a dwarf he united the soul of a giant and the valour of a gamecock. Then, for so small a man, his strength was prodigious; his fist would fell an ox, and his kick-oh! his kick was tremendous, and, when he had his boots on, would, -to use an expression of his own, which he had picked up in the holy wars,-would send a man from Jericho to June. He was bull-necked and bandy-legged; his chest was broad and deep, his head large, and uncommonly thick, his eyes a little blood-shot, and his nose retrousé with a remarkably red tip. Strictly speaking, the Baron could not be called handsome; but his tout ensemble was singularly impressive: and when he called for his boots, everybody trembled, and dreaded the worst.

"Periwinkle," said the Baron, as he encased his better leg, "let the grave be twenty feet deep!"

"Your lordship's command is law."

"And, Periwinkle,"— Sir Ralph stamped his left heel into its receptacle," and, Periwinkle, see that it be wide enough to hold not exceeding two!"

“Ye—ye—yes, my lord."

"And, Periwinkle,-tell Father Fothergill I would fain speak with his reverence."

"Ye-ye-yes, my lord."

The Baron's beard was picked, and his moustaches, stiff and stumpy, projected horizontally like those of a Tom-cat; he twirled the one, stroked the other, drew the buckle of his surcingle a thought tighter, and strode down the great staircase three steps at a stride.

The vassals were assembled in the great hall of Shurland Castle; every cheek was pale, every tongue was mute, expectation and perplexity were visible on every brow. What would his lordship do? Were the recusant anybody else, gyves to the heels and hemp to the throat were but too good for him: but it was Father Fothergill who had said "I won't;" and, though the Baron was a very great man, the Pope was a greater, and the Pope was Father Fothergill's great friendsome people said he was his uncle.

Father Fothergill was busy in the refectory trying conclusions with a venison pasty, when he received the summons of his patron to attend him in the chapel cemetery. Of course he lost no time in obeying it, for obedience was the general rule in Shurland Castle. If anybody ever said "I won't," it was the exception; and, like all other exceptions, only proved the rule the stronger. The Father was a friar of the Augustine persuasion; a brotherhood which, having been planted in Kent some few centuries earlier, had taken very kindly to the soil, and overspread the county much as hops did some few centuries later. He was plump and portly, a little thick-winded, especially after dinner, stood five feet four in his sandals, and weighed hard upon eighteen stone. He was moreover a personage of singular piety; and the iron girdle, which, he said, he wore under his cassock to mortify withal, might have been well mistaken for the tire of a cart-wheel. When he arrived, Sir Ralph was pacing up and down by the side of a newly-opened grave.

"Benedicite! fair son,"-(the Baron was as brown as a cigar,)— "Benedicite!" said the chaplain.

The Baron was too angry to stand upon compliment.-" Bury me that grinning caitiff there!" quoth he, pointing to the defunct.

"It may not be, fair son," said the friar; "he hath perished without absolution."

"Bury the body!" roared Sir Ralph.

"Water and earth alike reject him," returned the chaplain; "holy St. Bridget herself

"Bridget me no Bridgets! do me thine office quickly, Sir Shaveling; or, by the piper that played before Moses !" The oath was a fearful one; and whenever the Baron swore to do mischief, he was never known to perjure himself. He was playing with the hilt of his sword. "Do me thine office, I say. Give him his passport to heaven!"

"He is already gone to hell!" stammered the friar.

"Then do you go after him!" thundered the Lord of Shurland.

:

His sword half leaped from its scabbard. No!-the trenchant blade that had cut Suleiman Ben Malek Ben Buckskin from helmet to chine disdained to daub itself with the cerebellum of a miserable monk it leaped back again; and as the chaplain, scared at its flash, turned him in terror, the Baron gave him a kick!—one kick !—it was but one!-but such a one! Despite its obesity, up flew his holy body in an angle of forty-five degrees; then, having reached its highest point of elevation, sunk headlong into the open grave that yawned to receive it. If the reverend gentleman had possessed a neck, he had infallibly broken it; as he did not, he only dislocated his vertebræ,but that did quite as well. He was as dead as ditch-water.

"In with the other rascal !" said the Baron, and he was obeyed; for there he stood in his boots. Mattock and shovel made short work of it; twenty feet of superincumbent mould pressed down alike the saint and the sinner. "Now sing a requiem who list!" said the Baron, and his lordship went back to his oysters.

The vassals at Castle Shurland were astounded, or, as the seneschal Hugh better expressed it, "perfectly conglomerated," by this event. What! murder a monk in the odour of sanctity, . and on consecrated ground too! They trembled for the health of the Baron's soul. To the unsophisticated many it seemed that matters could not have been much worse had he shot a bishop's coach-horse; -all looked for some signal judgment. The melancholy catastrophe of their neighbours at Canterbury was yet rife in their memories: not two centuries had elapsed since those miserable sinners had cut off the tail of St. Thomas's mule. The tail of the mule, it was well known, had been forthwith affixed to that of the mayor; and rumour said it had since been hereditary in the corporation. The least that could be expected was, that Sir Ralph should have a friar tacked on to his for the term of his natural life! Some bolder spirits there were, 'tis true, who viewed the matter in various lights, according to their different temperaments and dispositions; for perfect unanimity existed not even in the good old times. The verderer, roistering Hob Roebuck, swore roundly, ""Twere as good a deed as eat to kick down the chapel as well as the monk."-Hob had stood there in a white sheet for kissing Giles Miller's daughter.-On the other hand, Simpkin Agnew, the bell-ringer, doubted if the devil's cellar, which runs under the bottomless abyss, were quite deep enough for the

delinquent, and speculated on the probability of a hole being dug in it for his especial accommodation. The philosophers and economists thought with Saunders M'Bullock, the Baron's bagpiper, that “a feckless monk more or less was nae great subject for a clamjamphry," especially as "the supply considerably exceeded the demand;" while Malthouse, the tapster, was arguing to Dame Martin that a murder now and then was a seasonable check to population, without which the Isle of Sheppey would in time be devoured, like a mouldy cheese, by inhabitants of its own producing. Meanwhile, the Baron ate his oysters, and thought no more of the matter.

But this tranquillity of his lordship was not to last. A couple of Saints had been seriously offended; and we have all of us read at school that celestial minds are by no means insensible to the provocations of anger. There were those who expected that St. Bridget would come in person, and have the friar up again as she did the sailor; but perhaps her ladyship did not care to trust herself within the walls of Shurland Castle. To say the truth, it was scarcely a decent house for a female Saint to be seen in. The Baron's gallantries, since he became a widower, had been but too notorious; and her own reputation was a little blown upon in the earlier days of her earthly pilgrimage: then things were so apt to be misrepresented: in short, she would leave the whole affair to St. Austin, who, being a gentleman, could interfere with propriety, avenge her affront as well as his own, and leave no loop-hole for scandal. St. Austin himself seems to have had his scruples, though of their precise nature it were difficult to determine, for it were idle to suppose him at all afraid of the Baron's boots. Be this as it may, the mode which he adopted was at once prudent and efficacious. As an ecclesiastic, he could not well call the Baron out, had his boots been out of the question; so he resolved to have recourse to the law. Instead of Shurland Castle, therefore, he repaired forthwith to his own magnificent monastery, situate just without the walls of Canterbury, and presented himself in a vision to its abbot. No one who has ever visited that ancient city can fail to recollect the splendid gateway which terminates the vista of St. Paul's street, and stands there yet in all its pristine beauty. The tiny train of miniature artillery which now adorns its battlements is, it is true, an ornament of a later date; and is said to have been added some centuries after by some learned but jealous proprietor, for the purpose of shooting any wiser man than himself who might chance to come that way. Tradition is silent as to any discharge having taken place, nor can the oldest inhabitant of modern days recollect any such occurrence. Here it was, in a handsome chamber, immediately over the lofty archway, that the superior of the monastery lay buried in a brief slumber snatched from his accustomed vigils. His mitre-for he was a mitred abbot, and had a seat in parliament-rested on a table beside him; near it stood a silver flagon of Gascony wine, ready, no doubt, for the pious uses of the morrow. Fasting and watching had made him more than usually somnolent, than which nothing could have been better for the purpose of the Saint, who now appeared to him radiant in all the colours of the rainbow.

"Anselm !"-said the beatific vision,-" Anselm! are you not a pretty fellow to lie snoring there, when your brethren are being knocked at head, and Mother Church herself is menaced! It is a sin and a shame, Anselm!"

his

"What's the matter?-Who are you?" cried the Abbot, rubbing eyes, which the celestial splendour of his visiter had set a-winking. "Ave Maria! St. Austin himself!-Speak, Beatissime! what would you with the humblest of your votaries ?"

"Anselm !" said the Saint, "a brother of our order, whose soul Heaven assoilzie! hath been foully murdered. He hath been ignominiously kicked to the death, Anselm; and there he lieth cheek-by-jowl with a wretched carcass, which our sister Bridget has turned out of her cemetery for unseemly grinning. Arouse thee, Anselm!"

"Ay, so please you, Sanctissime!" said the Abbot; "I will order forthwith that thirty masses be said, thirty Paters, and thirty Aves.” "Thirty fools' heads !" interrupted his patron, who was a little peppery.

"I will send for bell, book, and candle."

"Send for an inkhorn, Anselm. Write me now a letter to his Holiness the Pope in good round terms, and another to the coroner, and another to the sheriff, and seize me the never-enough-to-be-anathematised villain who hath done this deed! Hang him as high as Haman, Anselm !—up with him!—down with his dwelling-place, root and branch, hearth-stone and roof-tree,-down with it all, and sow the site with salt and sawdust !"

St. Austin, it will be perceived, was a radical reformer.

"Marry will I," quoth the Abbot, warming with the Saint's eloquence; "ay, marry will I, and that instanter. But there is one thing you have forgotten, most Beatified-the name of the culprit." Ralph de Shurland."

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"The Lord of Sheppey! Bless me!" said the Abbot, crossing himself, "won't that be rather inconvenient? Sir Ralph is a bold baron and a powerful; blows will come and go, and crowns will be cracked, and

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"What is that to you, since yours will not be of the number?" Very true, Beatissime! I will don me with speed, and do your bidding.'

"Do so, Anselm!-fail not to hang the baron, burn his castle, confiscate his estate, and buy me two large wax-candles for my own particular shrine out of your share of the property."

With this solemn injunction the vision began to fade.

"One thing more!" cried the Abbot, grasping his rosary. "What is that?" asked the Saint.

"O Beate Augustine, ora pro nobis !” "Of course I shall," said St. Austin.

bot Anselm was left alone.

"Pax vobiscum !"—and Ab

Within an hour all Canterbury was in commotion. A friar had been murdered, -two friars-ten-twenty; a whole convent had been assaulted, sacked,-burnt,-all the monks had been killed, and all the nuns had been kissed! Murder!-fire!-sacrilege! Never was city in such an uproar. From St. George's gate to St. Dunstan's suburb, from the Donjon to the borough of Staplegate, all was noise and hubbub. "Where was it?"-" When was it?"-" How was it?" The Mayor caught up his chain, the Aldermen donned their furred gowns, the Town-clerk put on his spectacles. "Who was he?""What was he?"-"Where was he?"-he should be hanged,—he should be burned, he should be broiled, he should be fried,-he