Another year, and Benjamin's campaign is ended. At the hearth in Hartshorn-lane sits Margaret Fowler--in solitude. There will be no more strife about her son. Death has settled the controversy. Margaret is very poor. Her trade is unprosperous; for the widow is defrauded by her servants. "Mother, there is my grandfather's sword--it has done service; and now, I will work for you."--"How, my son?"--"I will be a bricklayer again." We see the Shadow of the Mother, as she strives to make her son content. He has no longer the "lime and mortar" hands with which it was his after-fate to be reproached; but he bestows the master's eye upon his mother's workmen. Yet he has hours of leisure. There is a chamber in the old house now filled with learned books. He reads, and he writes, as his own pleasure dictates. "Mother," he one day says, "I wish to marry."--"Do so, my son; bring your wife home; we will dwell together." So a few years roll on. He and his wife weep "Mary, the daughter of their youth." But there is an event approaching which sets aside sorrow. "Daughter," says the ancient lady, "we must to the Rose Playhouse to-night. There is a new play to be acted, and that play is Benjamin's."--"Yes, mother, he has had divers moneys already. Not much, I wot, seeing the labor he has given to this 'Comedy of Humors'--five shillings, and ten shillings, and, once, a pound."--"No matter, daughter, he will be famous; I always knew he would be famous." A calamity clouds that fame. The play-writer has quarrels on every side. In the autumn of 1598, Philip Henslowe, the manager of "the Lord Admiral's men," writes thus to his son-in-law, Alleyn; "Since you were with me, I have lost one of my company, which hurteth me greatly--that is, Gabriel; for he is slain in Hogsden Fields, by the hands of Benjamin Jonson, bricklayer." Twenty years after, the great dramatist, the laureat, thus relates the story to Drummond: "Being appealed to the fields, he had killed his adversary, which had hurt him in the arm, and whose sword was ten inches longer than his; for the which he was imprisoned and almost at the gallows." There is the proud Shadow of a Roman Matron hovering about his cell, in those hours when the gallows loomed darkly in the future.