banks among the clover, and the frilled and fluted bell of the cowslip, hiding its single drop of blood, closes its petals as the night comes down." He pauses in the nave of the church and there in the soft glow, cast by the last shaft of glory from the setting sun, he sees that vacant place where, his father has told him, the tabernacle had been. It is gone. Perchance an old woman,

who had seen the Faith in its glory, lies prostrate, sobbing before the despoiled altar whence her God has been And then he murmurs, with his own dying Queen Katharine:

torn.

"Spirits of peace, where are you? Are you all gone

And leave me here in wretchedness behind ye?"

-And, folding his hands at his back, he passes back through the sweet-scented lane, whose blossoms shall fall on his own coffin ere long. His eyes are soft and hazel; his cheeks are not as ruddy as when he laid the cloth for his father and mother in earlier days; his forehead is dome-like; he wears his customary suit of scarlet and black. So he goes to New Place, for which he has so long worked, to the demure Judith who waits. for him, to his little chubby cheeked grandchild, Bess Hall. The antlers in the entry, the silver tankards on the sideboard, of which his wife and Judith are so proud, show dimly in the failing night; he murmurs the new song he has lately made for his play of "Cymberine."

Fear no more the heat o' the sun,
Nor the furious winter's rages;
Thou thy worldly task has done,

Home art gone and ta'en thy wages."

A swan glides slowly to her nest among the reeds of

the Avon. "The crimson drops i' the bottom of the cows ip," are now quite hid from the sight of the swallow that westward flies across the meadows. William Shakespeare, whom God gifted so gloriously, passes with the sadness of the gloaming in his soul.

"And the rest is silence"

Maurice F. Egan.

3014