as confined to a particular piece of stone, it is natural that he should fancy he must go to the stone to find Him. From this unscriptural notion the Lollards had to a great extent emancipated themselves. Mr. Robesart therefore answered Lawrence as most priests would not have done, for in his eyes the presence of Christ was not restricted to the altar-stone and the consecrated wafer.

"My son, say in thine heart—thou needest not speak it loud—'Jesus, be with me,' before thou dost any matter, or goest any whither. Our Lord will hear thee. Wilt thou so do?"

Lawrence gave the promise, with a child's readiness to promise anything asked by a person whom he loved and reverenced. The priest lifted his eyes.

"Lord keep him in mind!" he said in a low voice. "Keep Thyself in the child's heart, and bear him upon Thine before the Father!—Now, my son, go, and God be with thee."

Mr. Robesart laid his hand again on the child's head, and with a slower step than before, as if some awe rested upon him, Lawrence went down to the hovel below the hill.

The journey from Usk to Ireland was a far more new and strange experience to Lawrence than it could be to Roger. The latter had taken various short journeys from one of his father's castles to another, or on occasional visits to friends and relatives of the family: but the former had spent all his little life in the hovel at Usk, and his own feet were the only mode of travelling with which he had hitherto been acquainted. The sea was something completely new to both. Lawrence was deeply interested in finding out that fishes lived in that mighty ocean which seemed alike so potent and so interminable. He wanted to go down to the bottom and see the fishes alive in their own haunts, and find out what was there beside them. But after timidly hinting at these aspirations to an archer and a squire, and perceiving that both were inclined to laugh at him, Lawrence locked up the remainder of his fancies in his own breast, and awaited further light and future opportunities.

Meditations of this kind did not trouble Roger. He found quite enough to look at in the visible world, without puzzling his brain by speculations concerning the unseen. His nature disposed him at all times to action rather than thought.

Two months were consumed on the voyage to Ireland: not by any means an unreasonable time, when that period or longer was frequently required between Dover and Calais. They were detained previously at Holyhead, waiting for a south-east wind, only for a fortnight, which was rather a matter for congratulation; as was also the fact that they were only twice in danger of their lives during the voyage. Perils in the wilderness, and perils in the sea, were much more intelligible to our forefathers than to ourselves.

Roger was growing dreadfully tired of sea and sky long before the shore of Antrim was sighted. Lawrence was tired of nothing but his own ignorance and incapacity to understand what he saw. He wanted to know—to dive to the bottom of every thing, literally and figuratively: and he did not know how to get there, and nobody could or would tell him. Surely things had an end somewhere—if one could only find it out!

The voyage came to one, at any rate; and on a beautiful summer morning, the keel of the Grace Dieu at last grated upon the shingle of Ulster. Half-a-dozen of the crew jumped out into the surf, and twice as many came to help from the land. The great boat was dragged on shore by the help of ropes, a ladder set against her side, and Roger carefully carried ashore by a squire. Lawrence was left to climb down as he best could. Both reached the ground in safety, and found themselves in presence of a crowd of officers and retainers in the Earl of Ulster's livery; from among whom in a moment the Earl himself came forward, and gave a warm fatherly welcome to his little son. After mutual greetings had been sufficiently exchanged between old residents and new-comers, the Earl mounted his horse, a superb bay caparisoned with a scarlet saddle-cloth, and Roger having been lifted on a white pony beside him, they rode away to the Castle of Carrickfergus.

Ulster was in the fourteenth century, as it still is in the nineteenth, in a much more settled, and to English eyes a more civilised condition, than the Milesian parts of Ireland: but even there, that hatred of rent which seems characteristic of the Irish race, flourished quite as luxuriantly as now. Fifty years before this date, Maud of Lancaster, the girl-widow of the murdered Earl of Ulster, and great-grandmother of little Roger, had been constrained to address piteous appeals to King Edward III. for his charity, on the ground that while nominally possessed of large property, she had really nothing to live upon, since her Irish tenants would not pay their rents.

The English mind, which is apt to pride itself upon its steady-going, law-abiding tendencies, was much exercised with this Irish peculiarity, which it could not understand at all. Why a man should not pay rent for land which the law affirmed was not his own, and what possible objection he could have to doing so beyond a wish to keep his money in his pocket, was wholly unintelligible to the Saxon mind, which never comprehended that passionate love for the soil, that blind clinging to the homestead, which are characteristic of the Celt. Those who have those qualities, among our now mixed race, whatever their known pedigree be, may rest assured that Celtic blood—whether British, Gaelic, or Erse—has entered their veins from some quarter.

The Irish, on their part, were for ever looking back to that day when they were lords of the soil, before the foot of the stranger had ever pressed the turf of the Green Isle. It was the land which they yearned to emancipate rather than themselves. In Celtic eyes a monarch is king of the land, and the people who dwell on it are merely adventitious coincidences: in Saxon eyes he is king of the people, and the land is simply the piece of matter which holds the people in obedience to the law of gravitation. The latter must necessarily be an emigrating and colonising race: the former as certainly, by the very nature of things, must feel subjection to a foreign nation an intolerable yoke, and exile one of the bitterest penalties that can be visited on man. How are these two types of mind ever to understand each other?

It has been well said that "there is not only one Mediator between God and man, but also one Mediator between man and man, the Man Christ Jesus." Never, as Man, was a truer patriot, and yet never was a more thorough cosmopolitan, than He whose eyes as God are always upon the Land of Israel, and who hath loved Zion. Can we not all learn of Him, and bear with each other till the day comes when we shall see eye to eye—when there shall be one nation upon the mountains of Israel, and one King over all the earth,—one flock, and one Shepherd?