overmastered the assembly. Its contagious thrill seized Leacraft, and brought his mental receptivity up to a quickened pitch of almost deranged alertness, while every sense seemed preternaturally awake. He heard a woman sob somewhere in front of him, and far down the left gallery, in the glare and glitter, he saw a noble head, white-haired, but still wearing the flush of manhood’s prime upon his cheeks, leaning on a hand, and turned towards him, with unchecked tears coursing silently from its upraised eyes; he saw a little girl clasping the neck of her mother and father, as she sat half on the laps of each, and heard the soft lisp of her kisses on their brows; he saw the almost saturnine face of a dowager stonily gazing at the speaker, and, most strangely, he detected on her finger a topaz ring cut in _relievo_ with the head of Queen Victoria; and yet, while his senses reported these trifles with startling keenness, they were also all enlisted in catching every gesture, every movement, every accent of the man whose plastic power of eloquence was there engaged in pleading for English abdication. How the words rang in his ears, how persuasively the voice sank and rose, and with what a soaring melody some of the cadences seemed to linger in the scented air. “Let us,” it said, “bow before the revelation of our own destiny. The ordination of Nature is the express reflection--nay, it is the objective expression of Divine will. Accept it with submission, with the subserviency of faith, and act on that condition with the abundance of that native resolution that from the time of Alfred has made our path upward, outward, onward. “I do not, sir, under-estimate the tremendous ordeal; I cannot be blind to the colossal undertaking. It resumes in one herculean exertion, all the efforts of our race through two thousand years. It is without precedent, or else it shall only be reverently compared to the exodus of the Children of God from Egypt. And in that light, sir, without subterfuge or apology, without extenuation of rhetoric, without ribaldry or vanity, I do regard it. We are solemnized by some vast scheme in the order of things to carry with us the genius of our civilization to another home, where its power and beauty shall both benefit others, and become themselves more powerful and more beautiful. We have lived through a stadium of progress and achievement. We certainly advance to the opening of another. Let the gathered multitudes of our race, here at its ancestral hearth, gird up their loins and accept the august command to go forth.