O! my lady, how shall I ever brook your weeping
face? But I will be trothful to the living and to
the dead.

"These, honoured Madam, from thy saddest,
truest Servant, "ANTONY PAYNE."

At the Restoration, the Stowe Giant reappears
upon the scene, in attendance on his young
master, John Granville. Sir Beville's son had
been instrumental in the return of the king, and
had received from Charles the Second largesse of
money, great offices, and the earldom of Bath.
Among other places of trust, he was appointed
Governor of the Garrison at Plymouth. There
Payne received the appointment of Halberdier of
the Guns, and the king, who held him in singular
favour, commanded his portrait to be painted by
the court artist, Sir Godfrey Kneller. The fate
of this picture was one of great vicissitude. It
hung in state for some years in the great gallery
at Stowe; thence, when that mansion was
dismantled, at the death of the Earl of Bath, it was
removed to Penheale, another manor-house of
the Granvilles, in Cornwall; but it ceased to be
highly esteemed, from the ignorance of the people
and the oblivion of years, insomuch so that when
Gilbert, the Cornish historian, travelled through
the county to collect materials for his work, he
discovered the portrait, rolled up in an empty
room, and described by the farmer's wife as " a
carpet with the effigy of a large man upon it."
It was a gift to her husband, she said, from the
landlord's steward, and she was glad to sell it as
she did for eight pounds! When Gilbert died,
his collection of antique curiosities was sold by
auction at Devonport, where he lived, and this
portrait of Payne, which had been engraved as
the frontispiece to the second volume of his
History of Cornwall, was bought by a stranger,
who was passing through the town, and who
had strolled in to look at the sale, at the price of
forty guineas. The value had been apparently
enhanced by oil, and varnish, and frame. This
stranger proved to be a connoisseur in paintings;
he conveyed it to London, and there it was
ascertained to be one of the masterpieces of
Kneller; it was resold for the enormous sum of
eight hundred pounds. This picture, or even the
engraving in Gilbert's work, reveals still to the
eye the Giant of Old Stowe, " in his natural
presentiment" as he lived. There he stands
before the eye, a stalwart soldier of the guard.
One hand is placed upon a cannon, and the other
wields the tall halberd of his rank and office as
yeoman of the guns. By a strange accident this
very weapon and a large flask or flagon, sheathed
in wicker-work, which is said to have held
"Antony's allowance," a gallon of wine, and
which is placed in the picture on the ground at
his feet both these relics of the time and the
man are now in the possession of the writer of
this article, in the Vicarage House, near Stowe.
It was in Plymouth garrison, and in his later
clays, that an event is recorded of Payne, which
testifies that even after long years " his eye had
not grown dim, neither was his natural force
abated." The revolution had come and gone,
and William and Mary had been enthroned. At
the mess-table of the regiment in garrison, on
the anniversary of the day when Charles the
First had been beheaded, a sub-officer of
Payne's own rank had ordered a calf's head to
be served up in a " William and Mary dish."
This, in those days of new devotion to the House
of Hanover, was a coarse and common annual
mockery of the beheaded king; and delf, with
the faces of these two sovereigns for ornament,
was a valued ware (the writer has one large
dish). When Payne entered the room, his
comrades pointed out to him the insulting and
practical jest, to him, too, most offensive, for he was
a Stuart man. With a ready and indignant
gesture he threw out of the window the symbolic
platter and its contents.

A fierce quarrel ensued, and a challenge, and
at break of day Payne and his antagonist fought
with swords on the ramparts. After a strong
contest—for the offender was a master of his
weapon—Payne ran his adversary through the
sword-arm and disabled him. He is said to have
accompanied the successful thrust with the
taunting shout, "There's sauce for thy calf's
head!" When the strong man at last began to
bow himself down at the approach of one
stronger than he, the giant of Stowe obtained
leave to retire. He returned to Stratton, his
native place, and found shelter and repose in the
very house and chamber wherein he was born.

After his death, neither the door nor the stairs
would afford egress for the large and coffined
corpse. The joists had to be sawn through, and
the floor lowered with rope and pulley, to
enable the giant to pass out towards his
mighty grave. Relays of strong bier-men carried
him to his rest, and the bells of the tower,
by his own express desire, " chimed him home."
He was buried outside the southern wall of
Stratton church. When the writer was a boy,
the sexton one day broke, by accident, through
the side wall of a vast but empty sepulchre.
Many went to see the sight, and there, marked
by a stone in the wall, was a vault, like the tomb
of the Anakim, large enough in these days for
the interment of three or four of our degenerate
dead. But it was empty, desolate, and bare.
No mammoth bones nor mysterious relics of the
unknown dead. A massive heap of silent dust!

GHOSTS' GARMENTS.

"I CALCULATE from a slight but smart glance
at your physical peculiarities that you don't
believe in ghosts, youngster."

Now, besides being called "youngster" a
thing very irritating when you can catch hold
of your moustache without disfiguring your
upper lip there is something very irritating to
an Englishman in being addressed thus
summarily and personally by an entire stranger.
We, the only occupants of a first-class carriage
on the North-Western Railway, had only just
emerged from the first bridge after leaving