with us. We had supper at Bossenden, and
again lay down there. We had a flag with us
when we went to Sittingbourne, and most of
the men had clubs. We got up about seven
o'clock on the Thursday morning. In about
half an hour I saw Nicholas Hears. On hearing
a pistol tired, I looked round, and saw
Nicholas Mears falling. Courtenay at the same
time was running after another man, who made
his escape. After this, I came rouud to the little
court. Courtenay chopped the man with his
sword, and fired another pistol. I saw the body
removed. They carried it some little distance,
and then put it down by a ditch. We afterwards
went in and sat down to breakfast.
Courtenay and the prisoners were of the
party.

Another witness deposed that Courtenay
appeared to be well versed in the Scriptures. " He
asked three times on that day if we should like
to sing a hymn. The hymn which was sung
began thus: ' The shepherd watches the sheep
by day and by night.' I had heard it snug at
the chapel several times before. Courtenay
then said he would conduct us right, and I
believed he meant to do so. I do not, I am sorry
to say, know much about the Scriptures. I wish
I did. I can read, but cannot write. I have
heard the same things from the clergyman at
church. I think we all thought more of the
religion he was telling us of, than of his person.
He showed us a Bible, saying, ' Here,
this will bring us all home, and I hope it will.
I intend to follow it. ' He spoke very fluently,
but not in a particularly loud voice. He said
at Wells's that he would give us bread and beef.
I have lived thirteen years in the parish. Mr.
Wright is the clergyman, and lives close to the
church. When I was born, there was not any
school at Boughton for youth. I was put to
work very young. My children go to school."

Jacobs, a constable, produced the Spanish
military cloak worn by Courtenay found in
Bossenden Wood; also, a bag containing one
hundred and fifty bunches of matches and one
hundred and forty bullets of various sizes.
Edward Arnot, another constable, produced a
sword and pistol found in the wood, and a bag
ining a loaded pistol, powder-horn, one
hundred bunches of matches, a Bible, and a
pistol-belt.

Mr. Shee, who defended the prisoners, called
no witnesses; but fenced ingeniously as to the
legal definition of the ugly word murder.

Price and Mears were sentenced to death,
but were not executed: the former being
transported for ten years, and Mears for life.

In the dark ages, when the serfs were groaning
at the barons' feet, worse fed than the nobles'
deer, worse treated than the knights' boar-
hounds, with no hope in life, and no moment to
long for so much as that of death, a madman
like Courtenay might have set half England in
flames, have burned Canterbury, and sacked
London. When the black death or the sweating
sickness was devastating England, or
during the convulsions of the Reformation,
Courtenay could easily have gathered an army
of ignorant peasants together, and have worked
incalculable evil.

These Canterbury riots were a dreadful revelation
of the degraded ignorance in which the
highly civilised Kngiish landlords of the
nineteenth century allowed the tillers of their fields
and their out-door servants to remain. Here were
gentlemen, close to a cathedral town crowded
with well-paid clergy, permitting generation
after generation of people to grow up ignorant
and gross as the cattle they tended,
unable to read and write, therefore incapable of
advance or improvement, unable to lift
themselves from the slough of poverty and de-
basement, and so ignorant of the simplest
truths of Christianity, that they could risk their
lives in following a man from a madhouse, who
pretended to be at the same time Gideon,
Samson, and Jesus Christ; who asserted that
he had fallen from heaven to reduce the price
of bread; who declared that, he could draw fire
from heaven, and who actually, unhindered by
them, shot a poor constable who had not even
tried to arrest him.

Well might O'Connell, when taunted with
the obstacles that the Roman Catholics always
throw in the way of education, point with a
sneer to this outbreak of the lowest and most
debased form of fanaticism within sight of the
great Cathedral of Canterbury.

POOR PLAY-GROUNDS.

HALF a year ago, a piece of ground in a very
wretched court in Marylebone was bought for
a play-ground for poor children. A desolate,
dirty, untidy, bit of ground it was. Here and
there, lay great stagnant puddles; between them
forlorn-looking heaps of rubbish. A cooper
used one corner for his barrels, and the smoke
from his fire blackened the tumble-down wall
that bounded the space on one side. A stable
and shed stood in another corner; blocks of
timber lay about the ground. A fence, much
dilapidated, separated this space from a footway
leading past four little cottages to a fifth,
which stood in its own small yard. It had been
a stable once, and retained its paved floor; the
harness-room was the sitting-room, with its
small window as high up as ever; the lofts were
the bedrooms where the family and the many
lodgers slept. The first time I saw those rooms
they were clean, but very close. " Does not
that open?" I asked, pointing to a casement
window nearly blocked up by an enormous
nettle-leaf geranium. " Oh yes, miss," replied
the woman of the house, " but it's shut now for
the season. The days are getting cold." The
little yard was full of creatures—hens, rabbits,
doves, dogs—all, so near the houses as to be
very unhealthy.

When the purchase of the land and cottages
was completed, and the land was cleared of
stable, timber, and cooper, it presented even a
forlorner aspect. The wild dirty ragged boys,
no longer awed by the former occupants, trooped
into it through the broken palings; the