One of the strangest things in this strange world is the contrasts perpetually to be found in it. While Somerset lay thus under sentence of death, the Lord of Misrule passed through London. He was George Ferris, an old friend of the Hot Gospeller, and a warm Protestant himself; yet it would be a tolerably safe guess to assert that Ferris was a Lutheran. Scarcely would a Gospeller have filled that position on that day. Perhaps the relics of Dr Thorpe's Lutheranism were to blame for his persistent determination to have Twelfth Day kept with all the honours. He insisted on cake and snap-dragon, and was rewarded for his urgency by drawing the king, while Kate was found to be his queen. Their mimic majesties were seated in two large chairs at one end of the parlour, the white-haired king laughing like a child, while the little queen was as grave as a judge. The snap-dragon followed, for which a summary abdication took place; and greatly amused was the old man to find Walter in abject fear of burning his fingers, while Kate plunged her hand into the blue flaming dish with sufficient courage for any knight in Christendom. The evening closed with hot cockles, after which Esther took possession of the children, declaring, with more earnestness than was her wont, that they must and should not stay up another minute. "Verily," said the old Doctor, when they were gone, "if the childre must be had away, then should I follow; for I do feel in myself as though I were a little child to-night." "So you have been, methinks," responded Isoult, smiling on him, "for assuredly they had enjoyed far less mirth without you." And now the dark cloud closed over England, which was to be the one blot on the reign of our Josiah. Poor young King! he was but fourteen; how could he tell the depth of iniquity that was hidden in those cold blue eyes of the man who was hunting the hapless Duke of Somerset to death? Probably there was only one man who fully fathomed it, and that was the victim himself. And his voice was sterling in England no more. Words fail in the attempt to describe what the Duke's execution was to the Gospellers. There was not one of them, from the Tyne to the Land's End, who for the country's sake would not joyfully have given his life for the life of Somerset. He was only a man, and a sinful man too; yet such as he was, speaking after the manner of men, he was the hope of the Gospel cause. To every Gospeller it was as the last plague of Egypt; and to judge by the lamentations to be heard in all their houses, it might have been supposed that "there was not an house where there was not one dead." It is not often that a whole land mourns like this. Among her sons England has not many darlings, but those that she has, she holds very dear. The morning of the 22nd of January came.