battle of Stoke ended the wars of the Roses,
and Lambert Simnel fell into his hands, the
king, after offering supplications and
thanksgivings at Lincoln, sent his banner to be offered
to Our Lady of Walsingham, who had
graciously answered his prayers for victory. He
gave also, at the same time, an image of silver
gilt. Henry's burly son inherited the respect of
his subtle father for the Norfolk shrine, for in
the second year of his reign the young king
walked from Barsham, two pebbly miles off,
barefoot, to the sacred shrine, and there hung
a chain of gold and jewels round the neck of the
holy doll, which, years after, was derisively
burnt at Chelsea. At the time of the suppression,
Cromwell and King Henry's searchers set
their faces like flints against this shrine, issuing
nineteen articles of inquiry, and pressing cruelly
hard these two special bitter questions:

"Whether Our Lady hath done so many
miracles nowe of late, as it was said she did
when there was more offerings made unto her?

"Whether Our Lady's milke be liquid or no,
and whether the former sexton could not
testify that he had renewed the milk when it was
like to be dried up?"

Fragments of the ancient ecclesiastical grandeur
are still strewn about this Norfolk town.
Close by the "Common Place" there is an old
domed conduit, with bricked-up niches and the
stump of a broken cross; and not far from the
station, built up among stables and low sheds,
there are remains of the stately house of
Franciscan or Grey Friars, founded in 1346 by
Elizabeth de Burgo, Countess of Clare.

One side dart to Lynn, not because of its old
flint-chequered town-hall, or its venerable Grey
Friars' tower, nor for the Chapel of Our Lady
on the Mount, nor for the cup and sword King
John gave to the faithful town, dear to his
heart, but for the sake of a deeper and a more
tragic memory. In one of the finest poems of
that gentle lover of his kind, Tom Hood, it will
be remembered that Eugene Aram, after the
crime in the cave by the river-side at
Knaresborough, became usher at a school in
Piccadilly, and afterwards at one at Lynn, held in
an ancient chapel near St. Margaret's, the site
of which is now used as a meat market. Here,
while the bright-faced children leaped like
"troutlets in a pool," brooded,
                Apart from all,
                A melancholy man,
till that dreadful day came when
         Two stern-faced men set out from Lynn,
         Through the cold and heavy mist,
         And Eugene Aram walk'd between
         With gyves upon his wrists.

The crow, scenting the sea air and sea freedom,
strikes now with fleeter wings for Cromer,
where the greedy sea is at its old work, its last
bite being a mouthful of twelve acres at once,
on a January day in 1825. In the present
generation twenty houses have given way on
these cliffs. The jetty went in 1820, and a
second one in 1835; the shore bath-house was
washed off in 1836, and every year the inhabitants
have to sullenly fall back before the
invading waves that here roll in, unimpeded, the
whole way from Spitzbergen. Even the
lighthouse has had to retreat from its old enemy
two hundred and eighty yards, which is a great
concession for a lighthouse, which is always of
conservative tendencies. Forty years the
geologists give Cromer, and the all-devouring
German Ocean is to roll over its conquered
opponent, and the bay of "The Devil's Throat" is
to roar no more threats at the defiant fishermen.
In the mean time, let the Cromer fishermen
unload their tiles and coals, and smoke
their pipes in peace; at all events they have one
thing to boast of, and that is, Roger Bacon, the
rugged old mariner who discovered Iceland,
and took young James of Scotland prisoner off
Flamborough Head, was one of them. If Cromer
goes under, as crokers threaten, it will only
share the fate of those antediluvian forests, full
of elephants' teeth and deers' antlers, that are
found in the cliffs close by at Welybourne and
Mundesley. The soil of the present was ground
out of the fossils of the past.

And now with one quick glance across the
sea, that flashes in the sunlight, the crow turns
tail and bears straight, steady, and undeviating
for his old perch on the black, gold-tipped
mountain dome of St. Paul's, his next flight
being to the sea southward.

A TRUE STORY OF PRESIDENT
LINCOLN.

DURING the summer of the most disastrous
and doubtful year of the late American war,
the colonel of a New Hampshire Regiment lay
for some weeks extremely ill of camp fever,
near Hampton Roads, in Virginia. Hearing of
his critical condition, his wife left her northern
home, and, after much difficulty, made her way
to his bedside. Her cheerful presence and
careful nursing so far restored him, that he
was in a short time able to be transferred to
Washington

In the Potomac River, the steamer in which
the invalid officer, Colonel Scott, and his wife
had taken passage, was sunk, in a collision with
a larger vessel, in the night time. The crew and
nearly all the soldiers on board were rescued, or
saved themselves; but amid the horrible
confusion of the scene, Colonel Scott became
separated from his wife, and she was lost. The
colonel was picked up in the water by the crew of
the larger steamer, and under his direction every
effort was made to discover his wife, or rather
her body, for all hope of finding her alive was
soon abandoned. The sad search was fruitless;
it was resumed in the morning, the people
along the shore, humane Confederates, lending
their aid. But the grey, sullen river refused
to give up its dead, and the young officer, half
frantic with grief, was compelled to go on to
Washington. Within a week, however, he
received word from below that the body of the
lady had been washed on shore—that those
good country people, generous foes, had