foreground of the daïs, in that solemn interior, tall and young, with his great ruff and embroidered doublet, and his brilliant dark eyes held by the pathetic figure of Master Campion, how little could he have foreseen his own weary term of suffering in that gloomy fortress, and his sainted death there, at the end of the years! There were three other conferences under like conditions, but in other quarters, with four fresh adversaries. Campion was again “appointed only to answer, never to oppose”; that is, to answer miscellaneous and disjointed objections against the Catholic Church, without ever being allowed “to build up any harmonious apology for his own system.” The last conference was notable for its browbeating and threatening of a too successful adversary. The Bishop of London privately came to the conclusion that the verbal tournament was doing no good whatever to the sacred cause of Protestantism. The Council agreed, and ended it. Towards the end of October Campion was racked for the third time, and with the utmost severity, so that he thought they meant, this time, to kill him; but his fortitude was unshaken. A rough and honest first cousin to the Queen, Henry Carey, Lord Hunsdon, growled that it were easier to pluck the heart out of Campion’s breast than to wrest from him one word against his conscience. His arms and legs went quite numb after this final torture. The keeper, who was won over by his endearing prisoner, and was always as gentle with him as he dared to be, inquired next day how they felt. “Not ill,” said Father Edmund, with all of his old brave brightness, “not ill, because not at all!” Never once until now had he been accused of any conspiracy. But he was a troublesome person: he must be silenced somehow. With a tardy inspiration, the Council bent all their strength to get out of Campion some acknowledgment that he had been mixed up with the Spanish-Roman expedition, and the Irish rising of the preceding year. Not a shadow of proof could, of course, be produced for such a charge. Then, as a final and sure means of indicting him on some other count than that of religion, and of urging his execution upon the Queen, Walsingham, with Burghley’s connivance, hatched a treasonable plot out of his own inventive head, and got false witnesses to accuse Edmund Campion of it, and swear his life away. The “Plot of Rheims and Rome” was described as an attempt to raise a sedition, and dethrone and kill the Queen. It had an imaginary but recent date: 1580. Everybody or anybody, when found convenient, could be accused of so elastic a plot. It was first charged against some twenty priests and laymen in this year 1581; but it was brought up against the Earl of Arundel four years afterwards, despite the fact that the supposed interests of the Church were the last things likely to win his attention at the time assigned.