flew back, and bowed again three times towards it: then he came near again, and lifting up the corner of the cup, peeped into it; and seeing the wine, he let fall the cover on it again, and flew nimbly back and bowed as before. After these and many other apish, antick gestures, he himself received and then gave the sacrament to some three principal men only, they devoutly kneeling near the table; after which, more prayers being said, this scene and interlude ended." Could the cross, crop-eared old Puritan ever have been like other boys, and gone a bird-nesting? The simile seems to call up such a question, as if in his grim humour he reverted to his youthful days, little dreaming then that he should have to lose his ears and stand in the Westminster pillory. And Laud--he too (after all his pious "anticks," as Prynne calls the ceremony of the consecration of St. Catherine Cree) was beheaded at the Tower. While we stood within this old church, we pictured those two earnest men in that cold January morning--the one religiously performing his duties, with no doubt reverential awe; the other, with a sneer on his lips, leaning, perhaps, near the effigy of the recumbent knight, and scarcely able to suppress the contempt he felt for the ceremonies which such as he and the stern-souled Cromwell despised, with many others who were so soon to shake a throne, and trample on the "divinity of kings," as if it were but dust. But we are forgetting Stowe and the adjoining church of St. Andrew's Undershaft. Why it was so called, the pleasing historian, who has long slept (not undisturbed) within the church, shall tell us in his own sweetly-quaint old language; for though "dead, he yet speaketh," and never hath London before or since had so pleasing a chronicler. He says, "because that of old time every year, on May-day morning, it was used that an high or long shaft or May-pole was set up there before the south door of the said church." And he had often seen that "long shaft" set up--perhaps in his younger days danced around it, eyeing askance some citizen's pretty daughter: it may be she who outlived him, and at her own expense raised the present monument to his memory; and as she came in after-days to look at it, sighed as she thought of the bygone years when they danced, hand in hand, together around the May-pole, or of their walks in the summer evenings, when he pointed out to her some old surviving landmark that to him was hallowed by its historical associations, little thinking then that to him after-ages would be so much indebted for all that is known of ancient London. Peace to his venerable ashes! his shadow seems to fill the old church, and we think only of him. The ribbed roof and "deep-dyed" window are all we can remember; but what the stained glass represents we cared not to inquire, so much was our mind occupied with Stowe and the merry May-days of old London.