the ape sprang upon the back of one of the
sceptics, who, believing it to be the prince of
evil himself, fell on his knees and began to
shout and pray. The club never rallied afterwards.

Swift away, after this short resting, to where
the blue smoke rises over Reading, like the
smoke from a witch's caldron. Let the crow
alight first on the abbey gateway. This abbey,
founded by Henry the First, and endowed
with the privilege of coining, attained
a great name among the English abbeys by the
"incorrupt hand " of St. James the apostle,
presented to it by Henry the First. After
working thousands of miracles, raising cripples,
curing blindness—after millions of pilgrimages
had been made to it, and it had been for centuries
incensed and glorified, this wonderful
hand was lost at the Dissolution. Some worshipper,
who still venerated it, hid it under
ground, where it was found years afterwards,
and is now preserved at Danesfield by a Roman
Catholic family. It will for ever remain a moot
point, however, whether the hand at Danesfield
is the original hand of St. James, or a mere
mummy hand, such as mediæval thieves used
as candlesticks and talismans. " Hands of
glory" the rascals called them.

This hand of St. James made the fortune of
the abbey at Reading, and was an open hand,
no doubt, to receive all current coin from the
groat to the broad piece. Bells rung, incense
fumed, priests bore the cross, and acolytes the
thurible in the abbey at Reading, encouraged
by the éclat of the incorruptible hand. Henry
the First always delighted in the abbey. He
held a parliament here; and here he received
Heraclius, the patriarch of Jerusalem, who,
safe out of reach of Saracen's arrow and
sabre, presented the king with the somewhat
nominal gifts of the keys of the Holy Sepulchre
and the royal banners of the sacred city, and
urged Henry to a foray on the Infidel. The
king was true to Reading till his death; for
when the stewed lampreys of Rouen hurried
him from the world, his heart, tongue, brains,
and bowels were buried in France, and the rest
of his royal remains forwarded to Reading,
where his first queen, " the good Queen Molde,"
lay already, and his second wife Adeliza afterwards
joined him. The abbey became quite a
royal cemetery after the eldest son of Henry
the Second was buried here. At the Dissolution,
when royal tombs were destroyed and the bones
"thrown out," the relics were beaten about
by the sextons' spades and tossed anywhere.
The poorest rubbish heap of Reading had some
of them to feed its nettles. At the same period
Hugh Farringdon, the abbot, was so contumacious
and stubborn, and so put out the royal
tyrant by his prate about popes, councils, and
decretals, that the king, flying out at last, had
him hanged, drawn, and quartered, and then
turned the abbey into a palace, which was destroyed
at the great rebellion: the ruins remaining
as a stone quarry for ages. On the
last abbot but one, King Henry the Seventh
played a trick. One day the king, hunting
near Windsor, lost his way, and, riding on to
Reading, passed himself off to the unsuspicious
abbot as one of the yeomen of the
guard. A noble sirloin of beef was placed
before him; on this he plied so well his
knife and fork that the abbot was delighted,
and watched him with placid admiration.
"Well fare thy heart," he said; "for here, in
a cup of sack, I do remember the health of his
grace your master; I would give a hundred
pounds on condition that I could feed so
lustily on beef as you do. Alas! my weak
and squeezie stomach could hardly digest the
wing of a small rabbit or chicken." The king
was silent, pledged him, and left him undiscovered.
Soon after, armed men beat at the
abbey gate, and the squeezie abbot was hurried
to the Tower. The abbot was there kept
some weeks a close prisoner, and nurtured on
bread and water; his body was empty of food,
Fuller says, and his mind full of fears. He
could not, resolve it how he may, imagine how
he had incurred the king's displeasure. At last,
the abbot's fast having been long enough, a
sirloin of beef was set before the delighted
man, and he soon verified the proverb that two
hungry meals make a glutton. Suddenly in
sprang the king out of a lobby where he had
been in ambuscade. " My lord," quoth his
majesty, " deposit presently your hundred
pounds in gold, or else no going hence all the
days of your life. I have been your physician
to cure you of your squeezie stomach, and now
I want the fee which I have deserved." The
abbot put down the money at once, and returned
to Reading, lighter in purse, but also
lighter in heart.

The town, long celebrated for its cloth
trade, was besieged by Essex and the Parliamentarians
in 1643. The Puritan entrenchments
are still visible in the valley. Ten days
the townspeople, encouraged by Sir A. Ashton,
bore the cannonade and then surrendered; but
the greatest alarm in the town was in 1688,
when the Reading men got into their heads a
notion that the rough-handed Irish soldiers of
King James were coming to massacre the inhabitants
during divine service. The panic received
the name of " The Irish Cry."

Archbishop Laud was the son of a Reading
clothier, and the charities he founded still
exist. John Bunyan used, in the days of his
persecutions, after his twelve years and a half
in dismal Bedford jail, sometimes to pass
through Reading, where he was known, on his
way to visit secret Baptist congregations, disguised
as a carter, and carrying a whip. He
is said here to have caught the fever of which
he died.

Perched on the tall flint tower of St. Lawrence
(a church once memorable for a silver
gridiron, and a portion of St. Lawrence), the
crow remembers that at this church Queen Elizabeth
would attend service, looking sharply
after the preacher's doctrine. A portentous
object to a nervous clergyman, that stiff old
lady in the ruff and jewelled stomacher must
have been, glowering at him from under the