The dim, dull lawsuit was almost the last incident in the long struggle, the last and darkest for the town. But it was the darkness that goes before the day. Fifty years more and abbot and abbey were swept away together, and the burghers were building their houses afresh with the carved ashlar and the stately pillars of their lord's house. Whatever other aspects the Reformation may present, it gave at any rate emancipation to the one class of English to whom freedom had been denied, the towns that lay in the dead hand of the Church. None more heartily echoed the Protector's jest, "We must pull down the rooks' nests lest the rooks may come back again," than the burghers of St. Edmunds. The completeness of the Bury demolitions hangs perhaps on the long serfdom of the town, and the shapeless masses of rubble that alone recall the graceful cloister and the long-drawn aisle may find their explanation in the story of the town's struggles. But the story has a pleasanter ending. The charter of James--for the town had passed into the King's hands as the abbot's successor--gave all that it had ever contended for, and crowned the gift by the creation of a mayor. Modern reform has long since swept away the municipal oligarchy which owed its origin to the Stuart king. But the essence of his work remains; and in its mayor, with his fourfold glory of maces borne before him, Bury sees the strange close of the battle waged through so many centuries for simple self-government. FOOTNOTES: [1] To one who knows what frightful cruelty and oppression may lie in simple legal phrases, the indignant sentence in which Walsingham tells his death is the truest comment on the scene: "Non tam villanorum prædictæ villæ de Bury, suorum adversariorum, sed propriorum servorum et nativorum arbitrio simul et judicio addictus morti." HOTELS IN THE CLOUDS.