Years went by, and the deacon become Bishop of Rome, when the Christian princess, Berctas’ marriage to the King of England gave him the opening he sought. He at once sent a Roman Abbot, Augustine, at the head of a band of monks, to preach the Gospel to the English people. The missionaries landed A.D. 597, on the very spot where Hengest had landed more than a century before, in the Isle of Thanet; and the king received them sitting in the open air, on the chalk-down above Minster, where the eye nowadays catches, miles away over the marshes, the dim tower of Canterbury. He listened to the long sermon as the interpreters whom Augustine had brought with him from Gaul translated it. “Your words are fair,” Æthelberdt replied at last, with English good sense, “but they are new and of doubtful meaning.” For himself, he said, he refused to forsake the gods of his fathers, but he promised shelter and protection to the strangers. The band of monks entered Canterbury bearing before them a silver cross with a picture of Christ, and singing in concert the strains of the litany of their church. “Turn from this city, O Lord,” they sang, “Thine anger and wrath, and turn it from Thy holy house; for we have sinned.” And then, in strange contrast, came the jubilant cry of the older Hebrew worship, the cry which Gregory had wrested in prophetic earnestness from the name of the Yorkshire king in the Roman market-place--“Alleluia!” Thus was begun the overturning of the heathen faith of our ancestors, and the establishment of Christianity among them. CHAPTER XI. INDIA. The Hindu mind still superstition sways Still to his Triune God the Brahmin prays; The laws of “caste” each generous hope restrain, And bind all mental powers with palsying chain. Still lives that old belief the Samian taught, Insects and brutes with human souls are fraught, Souls doomed to wander for uncounted years, Till, pure from earthly dross, they seek the spheres. NICHOLAS MICHELL.