Stonyhurst has many treasures,--illuminated missals, Caxton editions, a St. John's Gospel in Gaelic script said to have been found in the tomb of St. Cuthbert, relics of "Blessed Thomas More," original portraits of the Stuarts,--including the winsome picture of Bonny Prince Charlie as a child,--but the object of our quest was a little manuscript volume of Robert Southwell's poems. Of course the porter knew nothing about it, though he strove to impart the impression that this was the only matter in the universe on which he was uninformed, and "the teaching fathers" were still absent for their summer holiday; but a gentle old lay brother finally hunted out for us the precious book, choicely bound in vellum and delicately written in an unknown hand, with corrections and insertions in the young priest's own autograph. This Stonyhurst manuscript gives the best and only complete text for the strange, touching, deeply devotional poems of Father Southwell,--the text on which Grosart's edition rests. It is supposed that they were written out for him by a friend while he lay a prisoner in the Tower, and that in the intervals between the brutalities of torture to which that most sensitive organism was again and again subjected, he put to his book these finishing touches,--only a few months and weeks before he was executed at Tyburn by a blunderer who adjusted the noose so badly that the martyr "several times made the sign of the Cross while he was hanging." Our eyes filled as we deciphered the faded Elizabethan script: "God's spice I was, and pounding was my due; In fading breath my incense savored best; Death was the meane, my kyrnell to renewe; By loppynge shott I upp to heavenly rest. * * * * * "Rue not my death, rejoice at my repose; It was no death to me, but to my woe; The budd was opened to lett out the rose, The cheynes unloos'd to let the captive goe." As we were driving on to Whalley, to pay our tribute of honour to yet one shining memory more, the summit of Pendle Hill suddenly wrapped itself in sable cloud, and its haunting vixens let loose upon us the most vehement pelt of rain, diversified with lightning-jags and thunder-crashes, that it was ever my fortune to be drenched withal. One of the Lancashire witches is buried in Whalley churchyard under a massive slab which is said to heave occasionally. I think I saw it shaking with malicious glee as we came spattering up the flooded path, looking as if we had ourselves been "swum" in the Calder.