that he had thrust his sword right through the thin body of the alien, had driven the hilt home on his left breast; and that when he withdrew his sword, instead of falling dead to the earth, the stranger stood erect, laughing scornfully at him, and losing no blood, and showing no sign of any wound. Now all these things fortified the belief that the stranger was the Jew that could not die! Seeing that a deep impression was made upon many of his hearers who had gone into the hall with the determination of believing that there had been no magic, and that nothing unlawful had been done by the defenders of the liberties of the Saxon people and the privileges of the Saxon church, the cunning prior turned his attack upon Thurstan. It was notorious, he said, that Thurstan had been a profuse and wasteful abbat of that house, taking no thought of the morrow, but feasting rich and poor when the house was at the poorest; that he was a man that never kept any balance between what he got and what he gave; and that he had always turned the deaf side of his head to those discreet brothers the chamberlain, the sacrist, the cellarer and refectorarius, who had long since foretold the dearth and famine which the convent were now suffering. [Here nearly every monk present laid his right hand upon his abdomen and uttered a groan.] It was known unto all of them, said the prior, that under the rule and government of Thurstan such things had been done in the house as had never been done under any preceding abbat. The shrine-boxes had been emptied; the plates of silver and of gold, the gifts of pious kings and queens, had been taken from the shrines themselves; the treasure brought from the abbey of Peterborough had only been brought to be given up to the Danes and sent for ever from England, together with the last piece of silver the pilgrims had left in the house of Ely! And then the Jews! the Jews! Had not dealings been opened with them? Had not a circumcised crew been brought into the patrimony of Saint Etheldreda, and lodged in the guest house of the abbey? Had not the abbat’s seal been used in sealing securities that were now in the hands of the Israelities? And was not all the money gotten from the Jews gone long ago, and was not the treasury empty, the granary empty, the cellar empty,—was there not an universal void and emptiness in all the abbey, and throughout the patrimony of St. Etheldreda? [The monks groaned again.] In concluding his long discourse the prior raised his unmanly voice as high as it could be raised without cracking, and said—“Upon all and several the indubitable facts I have recited, I accuse this Girolamo of Salerno of magic and necromancy; and I charge Thurstan, abbat of this house, and Elfric, whilom novice in the succursal cell of Spalding, of being defensors, fautors, and abettors of the necromancer. And what saith the sixteenth of the canons enacted under the pious King Edgar? And how doth it apply to our abbat? The canon saith this—‘And