MORWENSTOW, February, 1853. _Dear P——_,—I have copied a little parable-story for you. Tell me if you can understand it. May God bless you, my dear child, whom I love for your father’s sake! Yours faithfully, R. S. HAWKER. Natum ante omnia sæcula. The first star gleamed over Nazareth, when thus the Lady said unto her Son: “Jesu, wilt thou not arise and go with me into the field that we may hear the sweet chime of the birds as they chant their evening psalm?”—“Yea, Mary, mother,” answered the awful Boy, “yea, for I love their music well. I have loved it long. I listened, in My gladness, to the first-born voices of the winged fowl, when they break forth into melody among the trees of the Garden, or ever there was a man to rejoice in their song. Twain, moreover, after their kind, the eagle and the dove, did My Father and I create, to be the token-birds of our Spirit, when He should go forth from us to thrill the world of time.” His theory was that the eagle symbolised the Holy Ghost in His operation under the old covenant, and the dove His work in the Church. The double-headed eagle, so often found in mediæval churches—and there is one carved on a boss at Morwenstow—he thought represented the twofold effusion of the Spirit in two dispensations. The following “Carol of the Kings” was written during the Epiphany of 1859, and published with the signature “Nectan” in a Plymouth paper:— A CAROL OF THE KINGS.