THE Barnewalls were in feeling both more Catholic and more Irish than the Stanihursts, and they showed Edmund Campion a no less tender hospitality. The great house was in a beautiful and remote situation. Running in and out of it was a horde of laughing children, including the eleven-year-old Janet who was to become Richard Stanihurst’s early-dying wife. Campion loved the hearty Knight, their father, and their lady mother, whom he calls “in very sooth, a most gentle and godly woman.” Though he mingled freely with the life of the family, he was considerately given the great garret to write in and hide in. Here he began his little _History_. First of all, though, he sent back a grateful missive in Latin to the men who had been so providently kind to him. To the Recorder, he says: “Was I not fortunate in such friendship and patronage as yours? How good, how generous it was of you to take in an unknown stranger, and to keep him all these months on the fat of the land! You looked after my health as carefully as after Richard’s, the son worthy of your love. You supplied me, too, with books, and made the best possible provision for my time of study: may I perish, if ever in this world, outside my room in Oxford, I had sweeter dealings with the Muses!... Up to this, I have had to thank you for conveniences; but now I must thank you for my rescue, and my very breath,—yes, breath is just the word! for they who succumb to these persecutors are wont to be thrust into dismal dungeons, where they inhale filthy fogs, and are cut off from wholesome air. But now, through you and your children’s kindness, I shall live, please God ... most happily.” The stress laid, in this affectionate letter, upon the writer’s appreciation of personal care, of the privacy dear to students, of good diet and pure air, tells its own tale of physical delicacy. Campion was slight in build, and like many another tireless and quenchless spirit known to history, at no time really strong. He ends by asking that his St. Bernard may be sent on to him, and encloses a lively page for his friend Richard, recalling the service rendered in snatching him from danger, and conveying him to Turvey House. “Is it not hard,” Campion breaks out, “that beholden to you as I am, I have no way of showing it?... Meanwhile, if these buried relics have any flavour of the old Campion, their flavour is for you ... you and your brother Walter ... you, up that whole night through, and he, summoned to us from his wife’s side. Seriously, I owe you much. I have nothing to write about unless you have time and inclination for a laugh. Have you? Then hold your breath, and listen! The day after I came here, as I sat down to work, into the bedroom burst a poor old soul, coming on what business I wot not. She knew nothing of me, so seeing me suddenly at her left, took me for a ghost! Her hair rose on end; she went dead white; she stared aghast; her jaw fell. ‘What is the matter?’ quoth I,