"You hate this place and this life. I have seen how uncongenial all your surroundings are to you. You are like some bright tropical bird carried away from his native sunshine, and caged under a leaden sky. Leave it, and fly away into the sunshine!"

"That is easily said!"

"You are not angry ?" he asked, eagerly, as she made a move to walk back towards the house.

"Why should I be angry ? But the sun is sinking fast, and papa will expect me. We had better return to the house."

"Stay yet an instant! This may be our last walk together. What would papa do, if you did not return home at all ?"

"Really I do not see the use of discussing so absurd a hypothesis."

"Not at all absurd. It must happen some day."

"There is Catherine at the gate, looking for us. I must go back."

"Ah, Veronica, you are angry with

me!"

"No."

"Then it is the shadow of Mrs. Grundy that has darkened your face. Why does she come between poor mortals and the

sunshine ?"

"Nonsense!"

CHRONICLERS and calendar-makers tell us that the second of September was marked by the births of St. Justus and St. Margaret, of William of Roschild and Stephen of Hungary, and of Howard the philanthropist; by the deaths of General Moreau, the hapless Princess of Lamballe, Alice Lisle, and the Lady Mary Hervey, celebrated for her wit and beauty at the court of George the Second. But a much more important and exciting event marks this date. The GREAT FIRE (it deserves capital letters) of London, burst out on the second of September, 1666. There is in existence longer than three years ago, corroborative in a record of this catastrophe, ferreted out no

its main features of the older narratives. We all know the leading particulars; how the fire began at ten o'clock at night, at a baker's house in Pudding-lane; how it raged for three days and nights; how it swept away nearly everything from the Tower to the Old Bailey; how it destroyed something the Cathedral of St. Paul's, the Royal Exlike twelve thousand houses, besides churches, change, hospitals, public halls, and institutions in great number. All this we know from the narratives by Evelyn and other writers. An interesting confirmation of those narratives has been recently brought to light. In 1866 Mrs. Everett Green, while making researches at the Record Office, discovered a letter which had

been addressed to Viscount Conway in September, 1666. The name of the writer does not appear, but internal evidence shows him to have been some kind of confidential agent to the viscount, having a certain control over said viscount's town residence in Queen-street, Cheapside, The letter gives an account of the dreadful fire, quite consistent with the narratives already known. quote.

Three passages we will

Of the panic which seized the citizens generally, the writer says: "So great was the general despair, that when the fire was at the Temple, houses in the Strand adjoining to

"Newton Killingworth, Esquire, informs: That he had apprehended a person during the Fire, about whom he found much combustible matter, and certain black things of a long figure, which he could not endure to hold in his hand by reason of their extreme heat. This person was so surprised at first, that he would not answer to any question; but being on his way to Whitehall, he acted the part of a madman, and so continued while he was with him."

"Mr. Richard Harwood informs: That being near the Feathers Tavern, by St. Paul's, upon the fourth of September, he saw something through a grate in a cellar, like wildfire; by the sparkling and spitting of it he could judge it to be no other." But this was rather lame evidence, relating to a date two days after the breaking out of the fire.

"A letter directed and sent by the post to Mr. Samuel Thurlton, in Leicestershire, from a person unknown, as followeth, dated October sixteen, 1666: Your presence is now more necessary at London than where you are, that you may determine how to dispose of your estate in Southwark. For it is determined by Human Counsel (if not frustrated by Divine Power) that the suburbs will shortly be destroyed. Your capacity is large enough to understand. Proceed as your genius shall instruct you-Cave: Fuge: Vale!"

Another bit of evidence was to the following effect: "A maid was taken in the street with two fire-balls in her lap. Some did demand of her Where she had had them? She said one of the king's life-guard threw them into her lap. She was asked why she had not caused | him to be apprehended? She said that she knew not what they were. She was indicted for this, and the bill found against her, and turned over to the Old Bailey; but no prosecution upon it."

Lilly's examination was due to a book which he had published some years before, under the title of Monarchy or no Monarchy, and which contained, among other hieroglyphics, a representation of a city in flames. Some of the members of the committee, remembering this picture, caused him to be sent for. Sir Robert Brook, chairman of the committee, said to him: "Mr. Lilly, this committee thought fit to summon you to appear before them this day, to know if you can say anything as to the cause of the late Fire, or whether there might be any design therein. You are called the rather hither, because in a book of yours long since printed, you hinted some such thing by one of your hieroglyphics." Lilly was accompanied by Elias Ashmole, to keep up his courage; and he replied thus: "May it please your honour, after the death of the late king, considering that in the three subsequent years the parliament acted nothing which concerned the settlement of the nation in peace; and seeing the generality of people dissatisfied, the citizens of London discontented, the soldiers prone to mutiny, I was desirous, according to the best knowledge God

had given me, to make inquiry by the art I studied, what might from that time happen unto the parliament and nation in general. At last, having satisfied myself as well as I could, and perfected my judgment thereon, I thought it most convenient to signify my intentions and conceptions thereof in forms, shapes, types, hieroglyphics, &c., without any commentary; so that my judgment might be concealed from the vulgar, and made manifest only unto the wise. I herein imitated the examples of many wise philosophers who hath done the like."

The rogue! He made his hieroglyphics alarming enough to cause the book to sell, and then left every one to interpret the pictures according to taste. We have not even yet quite seen the last of that class of almanacmakers!

Lilly proceeded: "Having found, sir, that the City of London should be sadly afflicted with a great plague, and not long after with an exorbitant fire, I framed these two hieroglyphics as represented in the book, which in effect have proved very true."

"Did you foresee the year?" asked a member of the committee.

"I did not, nor was desirous of that I made

no surety. Whether there was any design of burning the city, or any employed to that purpose, I must deal ingenuously with you, that since the Fire I have taken much pains in the search thereof, but cannot or could not give myself any the least satisfaction therein. I conclude that it was alone the finger of God; but what instruments he used thereunto I am ignorant.”

It is impossible not to see the cunning with which Lilly managed his replies: feeding the popular belief in his prophetic powers, and yet keeping himself free from dangerous suspicions concerning the Great Fire.

The upshot, in Lilly's own words, was: "The_committee seemed well pleased with what I spoke, and dismissed me with great civility." No other witness gave evidence of any value; and the nation settled down gradually into a belief that the conflagration of the second of September was purely accidental.

AS THE CROW FLIES.

DUE SOUTH. EPSOM TO BOX HILL.

DURDANS (the seat of the Heathcotes) was built by Lord Berkeley from the ruins of Nonesuch, and very full of old memorials the place is. Pepys mentions (Sept. 16, 1660) going to St. James's to see the Duke of York, on Admiralty business, and finding him starting with the king, queen, and Prince Rupert, to dine at Durdans. Evelyn, too, mentions, in his quiet, amiable way, going to Durdans, in 1665, and finding an assembly of savansDr. Wilkins, Sir William Petty, and Mr. Hooke-"contriving chariots, new rigging for ships," and of all things in the world-what was no doubt a sort of bicycle-" a wheel to run races in." He adds: "perhaps three such

persons together were not found elsewhere in Europe for parts and ingenuity." Wilkins was the man who tried to establish a universal language, and so nullify the fatal curse of Babel; Hooke was an astronomer, who was jealous of Newton, and claimed to have discovered the law of gravitation; and Petty was one of the most active founders of the Royal Society. The great days of Durdans were when Frederick, Prince of Wales, the son of George the Second, came to reside there. It was this patron of dancing-masters and toadies who first gave rise to the saying, "That whether there was peace or war abroad, there was sure to be family discord among the Guelphs." His sisters despised him; his strutting, little, demoralised father pronounced him a puppy, fool, and scoundrel; his mother cursed the hour in which he was born; and the prime minister described him as a poor, weak, irresolute, false, lying, dishonest, contemptible wretch. While still a lad he drank and gambled. "Ah! the tricks of pages," said his mother to his father. "No," replied the bear leader; "I wish to Heaven they were-they are the tricks of lacqueys, rascals!" One day looking out from a window at St. James's, he saw Bubb Doddington roll by. "There," said the estimable prince, "there goes a man they call the most sensible fellow in England; yet, with all his cleverness, I have just nicked him out of five hundred pounds." He joined the Opposition to spite his father and Sir Robert Walpole; and earned his father's undying hate by removing his wife when she was in actual labour from Hampton Court to St. James's Palace, from whence he was very soon "quoited" to Kew. His mother on her deathbed refused to insult his father by seeing him. During the '45 Rebellion, he showed some feeble desire to lead the army, being jealous of his truculent brother, the Duke of Cumberland; but the fool's ambition subsided into having a model of Carlisle Castle made in confectionery, and bombarding it with sugarplums at the head of his maids of honour and mistresses. Eventually the poor creature died from a cold caught by putting on a thin silk coat in the month of March, during a fit of pleurisy. In a fit of coughing, he broke an internal abscess, which had been caused by a blow from a tennis ball, cried out "I feel death!" and died almost immediately. The bitter Jacobite epitaph upon him was only too just:

Here lies Fred,

Who was alive, and is dead.
Had it been his father,
I had much rather;

Had it been his brother,
Still better than another;
Had it been his sister,
No one would have missed her;
Had it been the whole generation,
Still better for the nation;
But since 'tis only Fred,
Who was alive, and dead,
There's no more to be said.

Some traditions of Fred still linger about Epsom.

An obelisk (the flint of which went to face St. Martin's Church, in the town) that formerly stood at the end of an avenue of walnut trees in the Common Fields, marked the spot of Fred's only victory. The prince, one morning, walking alone in his white silk coat, espied a specially sable sweep, sitting contemplatively under one of the trees, perhaps fatigued with the ascent of the palace chimneys. Fred, indignant at such an unmannered churl coming between the wind and his nobility, bade him begone, and at once. The tired sweep, espying a fop or a footman, he hardly knew which, refused, point blank. The prince flourished his clouded cane, which the sweep wrenched from his hand and threw away, then stripped and offered combat. The prince, with a spark of the spirit of his grandsire at Dettingen, removed his silk coat and fell to. Tradition, generally loyal, affirms that the sweep was beaten; but there certainly are calumnious reports that the sweep conquered, and set his black foot on the wizen neck of Bubb Doddington's noble friend. Other local historians make George the Third (when a boy) the adversary and conqueror of the sweep;-such is History. Soon after Fred's lamented death, a Mr. Belchier rebuilt Durdans, but a fire destroyed the place, and one of the Heathcotes reared the present structure of red brick bound with stone. Certain it is that young Prince George was much here at the time when the populace were so jealous of his mother's unwise intimacy with handsome Lord Bute. The only other recollection of royalty at Epsom is at Woodcote Park, where the drive to the Racecourse has been closed ever since the Queen used it in 1840, her last visit to Epsom, at which place she is then supposed to have taken umbrage.

The crow flutters down for a moment on Pitt-place, that old mansion by the church. This house was the scene of one of the best authenticated, and yet most easily explained ghost stories than ever befooled the superstitious. It was the residence of Lord Lyttleton, secretary to Frederick, Prince of Wales, and author of the History of Henry the Second, and who leading the prince to patronise Mallet, Thomson, Pope, Glover, and Dr. Johnson, gained him the only credit he ever got or deserved. It gives us pain to observe that the worthy nobleman's History is wretchedly dull, and his poetry, all but the monody to his wife, intolerable. The son of this worthy peer was a celebrated rake, who, a short time before his death, declared that he had seen a white dove flutter over his bed, look mournfully on him, then disappear. short time after, the corpse of a woman clothed in white appeared by his bedside, and waved her livid hand, as she placed her face close to him, and uttered the words, "Lord Lyttleton, prepare to die!" he felt her cold breath, and saw that her eyes were glazed. He gasped out, "When?" and the apparition replied, "Ere three days you must die." This dead woman was a Mrs. Amphlett, who had died of grief in Ireland on the seduction of her two

A

daughters by Lord Lyttleton. On the fatal third day the rake, so the local tradition goes, breakfasted in London with Mrs. Amphlett's two daughters and some friends, was in high spirits, and remarked confidently, "If I live over to-night, I shall have jockied the ghost." The party then ordered post-horses, and set off for Pitt-place. On their arrival his lordship had a sharp attack of illness, but recovered. He went early to bed, first laughingly putting back the clock to deceive the ghost. He then sent his valet for a spoon to stir his medicine. On his return the servant found that his lordship had got out of bed, and had fallen dead on the floor. The simple fact is, that the miserable trickster had invented the whole story, having resolved to poison himself. There was, therefore, no miracle in the tolerably accurate fulfilment of a self-made prediction. "It was no doubt singular," says Sir Walter Scott, who was generally only too credulous, "that a man who meditated his exit from the world should have chosen to play such a trick upon his friends; but it is still more credible that a whimsical man should do so wild a thing, than that a message should be sent from the dead to tell a libertine at what precise hour he should expire."

When the wells were beginning to be disregarded, Epsom became notorious as the residence of Mrs. Mapp, the bone-setter, a character whom Hogarth has immortalised in his picture of The Consultation of Physicians. This Mrs. Mapp was the daughter of a Wiltshire bone-setter and sister of Polly Peachum, whom Gay enlisted into the Beggar's Opera. The bone-setter and the wise woman were at this period much resorted to by English country people, who preferred a doctor who was also a little of the astrologer. This woman, after wandering about the country as a sort of privileged mad woman, suddenly became an authority in surgery, and settled at Epsom, where the company at the wells supplied her with occasional dislocations. Her success, indeed, is said to have brought her so many patients that the people of Epsom paid her to settle amongst them. Broken arms and legs she dexterously set, dislocated shoulders and elbows she refitted. Gifted with amazing strength, she would plant her foot against a patient's chest and drag his bones back to their true position. "Crazy Sally" was a dangerous woman to offend. Some surgeons, jealous of her fame, once sent her a "posture maker," as acrobats were then called, with a wrist apparently dislocated. The man groaned and screamed, but Sally felt in a moment that the bones were in their proper order; so, to have her revenge, she gave the man's arm such a wrench as to dislocate it. "Go," she said, "to the fools who sent you and try their skill, if you like, or come back here in a month and I'll put you straight." In her flowery days, Mrs. Mapp, the bone setter, drove a carriage and four, and received as much as twenty pounds in the day. At last Mapp, footman to a mercer in Ludgate-hill, won by

her full purse, married her, robbed her, and forsook her, all within the fortnight. She never recovered this, and died in London in 1737 so poor that she had to be buried by the parish.

The Reverend Jonathan Bouchier, who became rector of Epsom in 1784, deserves a word as a sturdy Royalist and a great scholar, of whom several interesting stories are told. Before the American war broke out, Mr. Bouchier was rector of several parishes in Virginia and Maryland. He once thrashed a rebel Yankee blacksmith who had insulted his king and country, and to the very last he persisted boldly in preaching Royalist sermons. On one occasion the Tory rector had been informed that if he dared pray for King George he would be fired at in his pulpit. Nothing daunted, the next Sunday the resolute man ascended the pulpit stairs armed with two horse-pistols, one of which he laid on either side of his pulpit cushion; with this preamble he preached an unflinching sermon, ending with this stinging passage:

"Unless I forbear praying for the king I have been notified that I am to pray no longer. No intimation could be more distressing to me; but I do not require a moment's hesitation, distressing as the dilemma is. Entertaining a respect for my ordination vow, I am firm in my resolution, whilst I pray in public at all, to conform to the unmutilated Liturgy of my Church, and reverencing the injunctions of the Apostle: I will pray for the king and all who are in authority under him, as long as I live.' Yes, whilst I have my being, I will, with Zadok, the priest, and Nathan, the prophet, proclaim GOD SAVE THE KING." The Americans had no heart to fire at so bold and honest a

man,

and Jonathan Bouchier descended the pulpit stairs unharmed. This learned clergyman married a descendant of Addison's, a very beautiful Virginian girl. A curious and authentic instance of presentiment preceded their first meeting. Miss Addison had dreamed that she saw her future husband, and awoke with a vivid remembrance of his face and manner. The next day Mr. Bouchier called on her father with letters of introduction, and on Miss Addison entering the room, she saw in the handsome stranger the lover of her dream. This rector of Epsom devoted many years to a completion of Johnson's Dictionary. He left it at his death unfinished, and the manuscript, down to the letter I, is said to have been used by the compilers of Webster's Dictionary.

The crow passing over Surrey on his swift way to the sea, alights at Ashtead Park, on one of the limes, an avenue of which lightleafed trees was planted when William of Orange came here to visit his loyal adherent, Sir Robert Howard, a poor dramatist, the prototype of Bayes, in the Duke of Buckingham's comedy of the Rehearsal, and the Sir Positive Atall of Shadwell's Sullen Lovers. mantic plays, stuffed full of extravagant metaphors and false tropes, seem to have deserved all the ridicule showered upon them.

His ro