before he changed his opinion. The queen pleaded guilty to the fault, and reasoned upon the matter as follows: "My lord," said she, "this is very different from the noise and hilarity of yesterday; there are no brilliant hangings now; no table weighed down with silver vessels, no delicacies to delight the palate, neither flatterers nor parasites--all these have vanished like the smoke before the wind--have all passed away into nothingness. Ought we not, then, to feel alarmed, who covet them so much, yet are everyway as transient? Are not all such things so? and are we not ourselves like a river, that hurries headlong and heedlessly along to the dark and illimitable ocean of time? Unhappy must we ever be if we let such things occupy our minds. Think, I entreat you, how disgusting those things become of which we are so enamoured; and see what filthy objects we have become attached to; for in those filthy relics we may see what our pampered bodies will at last become. Oh! let us reflect, that the greater we have been, and the more powerful we now are, the more alarmed we ought to be, for the greater will be the punishment of our misconduct." Ina listened, sighed, resigned his crown, and set off for Rome, where he founded a school, and imposed a tax of a penny upon every family in his kingdom, which was called Romescot, and which went to support the institution he had raised. As a proof of his sincerity, he wore a common dress, lived meanly, cut his hair, laboured hard, and dwelt in retirement with his queen, until he died "a good old man." His brother, Inigils, had died a few years before him, a name that falls silent as snow upon the pages of History; yet like the snow, doing its silent work, for he must have been a man of some note in his day and generation, to have been the father of Egbert and the grandfather of Alfred the Great, from whom descended a long line of kings. The Mercian nobles rose up and put to death Ostrida, the wife of Ethelred their king, for what cause history is altogether silent; neither the why nor the wherefore is given--the sentence reads in the Saxon Chronicle like an epitaph upon a gravestone, yet she was the daughter of the once powerful Oswy of Northumbria, and when destroyed, queen of the Mercians. The very mystery which hangs around her fate interests us, and we want to know something about what she had done to draw down such dreadful punishment, but all our inquiries are vain; beyond the mere entry of her violent death, not even a doubt is registered, for us to pause over. The deed was done, and is recorded in one brief, terrible sentence, and we know no more. Her husband, Ethelred, abandoned the crown of Mercia to his nephew Cenred, and entered the monastery of Bardney, as a monk, going through all the routine of common duties, like a humble brother, until at last he rose to the rank of abbot in the monastery which he himself had founded.