through John Bonington when the plague was stalking grimly up and down the land; and this is what we learn about him--this and no more. Had John Bonington lost _his_ wife; and was he meditating a life of usefulness and penitence and prayer? Infert se sæptus nebula (mirabile dictu) Per medics miscetque viris, neque cernitur ulli, A shadowy form looming out from the mists that have gathered over the ages past, we see him for a moment, and he is gone. Fill up the gaps and tell all the tale, poet with the dreamy eyes, eyes that can pierce the gloom--poet with the mobile lips, lips that can speak with rhythmic utterance the revelations of the future or the past. All the lonely ones, and all the childless ones, did not turn parsons we may be sure; yet it is good for us to believe that John Bonington's was not a solitary instance of a man coming out of the furnace of affliction softened, not hardened; purified, not merely blistered, by the fire. Was Thomas Porter at Little Cornard somewhat past his prime when the plague came? It spared him and his old wife, it seems; but for his sons and daughters, the hope of his eld and the pride of his manhood, where were they? He and the good wife, cowering over the turf fire, did they dare to talk with quivering lips and clouded eyes about the days when the little ones had clambered up to the strong father's knee, or tiny arms were held out to the rough yeoman as he reached his home? "Oh! the desolation and the loneliness. No fault of thine dear wife--nor mine. It is the Lord, let Him do what seemeth Him good!" Thomas Porter had a neighbour, one John Stone, a man of small substance: he owned a couple of acres under the lord; poor land it was, hardly paying for the tillage, and I suppose the cottage upon it was his own, so far as any man's copyhold dwelling was his own in those days. The Black Death came to that cottage among the rest, and John Stone and wife and children, all were swept away. Nay! not all: little Margery Stone was spared; but she had not a kinsman upon earth. Poor little maid, she was barely nine years old and absolutely alone! Who cared? Thomas Porter and his weeping wife cared, and they took little Margery to their home, and they comforted themselves for all that they had lost, and the little maid became unto them as a daughter. Henceforth life was less dreary for the old couple. But five years passed, and Margery had grown up to be a sturdy damsel and very near the marriageable age.