Daily British Whig (1850), 14 May 1909, p. 8

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PAGE FIGHT. THE DAILY BRITISH WHIG FRIDAY, MAY 14, 1909. DUKE HAD 10 PAY PENALTY | fungus growth of grayish side-whiskers. "1 with an assumed air of sprightly interest, de: manded to see the relic, : "Certainly, sir," said the man, stroking a A STORY IN CONNECTION WITH EXE-| ches there were more gentlemen in your CUTION OF DUKE OF SUFFOLK. way of thinking; but 'ardly nobody cares for "it nowadays, and it is a most hinteresting hob- His Head, In An Almost Perfect State of Pre- servation, Can Now Be Seen in a Shabby Old Church Near the Thames for a Small Fee. Thomas Bailey Aldrich, On the 23rd of February, in the year 1554, Henry Grey, Duke of Suffolk, the father of the nine days' queen and the ingenious archi- tect of his own calamity, was led Arom his chamber in the Tower to a spot on Tower Hill, and promptly decapitated, as a slight testimonial of the Queen's appreciation of the part he had played in Northumberland"s con- spiracy and some collateral enterprises. Thus, like Columbus, he got another world for his recompense, This is known of all men, or mearly all men; but not one in a thousand of thosé who know it is eognizant of the fact that the head of the Duke of Suffolk, ite an almost perfect state of 'preservation, can be seer to this day in a shabby old church somewhere near * the Thames, at the lower end of the city--the Church of Holy Trinity. It may be noted here, not -irrelevantly, that an interview with his Grage costs from two shillings so gues and sixpence per head--your own head, 1 mean. It appears that shortly after the execution of the duke--on the night following, it is said-- this fragment of him was secured by some faithful servant, and taken to a neighboring religious house in the Minories, where it was carefully packed in tannin, and where it lay hidden for many and many a year. The secret of its existence was not forgotten by the few who held it, and the authenticity of the rélic s generally accepted, though there are icono- clasts who believe it be the head of Edmund de la Pole, Earl of Suffolk, who also passed' by the way Tower Hill, in 1513. But the Dantesque line of the nose and the arch of the eyebrow of the skull are dupliated ir the duke's portrait in the National Portrait Gal- lery, and would seem to settle the question. After the cruel fires of Smithfield and Oxford were burned out, and Protestantism, with Elizabeth, had.come in again, and England awoke as from a nightmaré--when this blessed day had dawned the head was brought forth from its sequestration, and became an item in the pious assets of the church in which it had found sanctuary. Just when the exhumation took place, and the circumstances attending it, of are unrecorded. It was only by chance, during a stay in Lon; don several years ago, that these details came mto my possession; but they were no sooner mine than a désire seized me to look upon the countenance of 8 man who had died on Tower I1ill nearly three hundred and fifty years ago. Breakfasting one morning with an old London acquaintanee, whom I will call Blount, I in- vited him to accompany me on my pilgrimage to the Minories. There was kindness in his ready acceptance; for the last thing to interest the average Londoner is that charm of his torical association which makes London the Mecca of Americans, Blount is a most intel ligent young fellow, though neither a bookman nor an antiquarian, and he confessed, with the characteristic candor of his island, that he hadn't heard that the Duke of Suffolk was dead! "Only in a general way, don't you know," he added. His views concerning the geography of the Minories were also lacking "The cabby will know how d Blount, optimisic- m po veness to get' us there," suggeste ally. But the driver of the hansom we picked up on Piccadilly did not seem so sanguine about it. "The Minories--the Minories," he repeated, smiling in a constrained, amused way, as if he thought that perhaps "the Minories" might be a kind of shell-fish. However; we directed him to take uf to St. Paul's Chirchyard, where we purposed to make further inquiries, but met a dearth of exact information as to where the Church of Holy Trinity was located. Yet the church, built in 1706, occupies the site of a once famous convent, founded in 1293 by Blanche, Queen of Navarre, for the sisterhood of "Poor Clares." It was from thé Minories that the Street took its name, and the street itself, according to Stow, was long celebrated for "divers fair and large storehouses for. ar- mor and habiliments of war, with divers work houses to the purpo Mr. Pepys, in his diary, has frequent refer ses to the Minor ies, and often went there on business. same which » hand Singularly enough, the gi the church stands por ) / some estate granted by Edward VI to the Duke of Suffolk in smoother days. So;-when all is said, there seems a sort of poetic fitness in his occupancy of the place. After a tedious drive through a labyrinth of squalid streets and alleys--after much filling and backing and a scemingly fruitless expenditure of horse--we finally found ourselves knocking at a heavily clamped door of wrinkled oak, obviously be- longing to an ancient building, though it look- ed no older than the surrounding despondent brickwork. There was a bit of south wall, how- ever, not built within the memory or record of man. The door presently swung back on its rheumatic hinges, and we were admitted into the vestibule by a man who made no question of our right to enter--the verger, apparently: a middle-aged person, slender and pallid, as if he were accustomed to dwell much in damp subterranean places. He had the fra- gile, waxen look of some vegetable that has eccentrically It was no strain on the imag been born in the crypt. 1S a sprouted in a cellar. ushered us into the church, a higl filled with gloom that seemed to have soured and turned into a odor. The IL idea of daylight drifted in through sev glass se stale don | narrow windows of smoky and blended gentally with the pervading dust, | The church was scarcely larger than an or i dinary chapel, and contained nothing of wote. | There were some poor monuments to the Dab- | mouth family, and a tablet here and | there. The woodwork black age, | and not noticeable for its carving. A registry | kept here of those who died .in the parish dur- | ing the plague of 1665 stimulated curiosity; . could the imaganation be deeply | impressed by the circumstance that the body of Sir Philip Sydney once lay in state in the chancel, while preparations were making in St. in lead, | m w with arcely Paul's for national obsequies to the hero of the my lord's forgiveness. iand proves ject. 'If it was in the British Museum, sir, {there'd be 'no hend of ladies and gentlemen | flocking to look at it. But this isn't the British | Museum, sir." | It was not; but the twilight, and the silence, land the loneliness of the place, made it the more proper environment, "You must have some f said. "Mostly Hamericans, sir. Lars} week, sir," --and a wan light that would have been a smile on any other face glimmered through the man's pallor,--'"larst week, sir, there was a gent'ere as wanted to buy the dook." "I recognized my countryman! visitors, however," wall on a nail, the verger unlocked a cupboard, and drew forth from its pit-like darkness a tin box, perhaps eighteen inches in height and twelve inches square, containing the head. This he removed from the case, and carefully placed in my hands, a little to my surprise. A bodiless head has dramatic qualities, that somehow do not appertain in a like degree to a headless body. The dead duke in his en- tirety would not have catised me the same start. After an instant of wavering, I carried the relic into the light of one of the windows for closer inspection. "E used to 'ave a very good 'ead of 'air," remarked the verger, "but not in my time; in my greaggrandfather's, maybe." A few spears of brittle hair,--not more than five or six at most,--now turned to a reddish brown, like the dried fibres of the cocoanut, still adhered to the cranium. 'At the base of the severed vertebra I noticed a deep indention, showing that the executioner Mad: faltered at first, and had been obliged to strike a. second blow in order to complete his work. A thin integument, yellowed in the process of em- balming, like that of a mummy, completely. coveged the skull, which was in no manner re- pulsive." It might have been a piece of medie- val carving in dark wood, found in some chant- ry choir, or an amiable gargoyle from a ca- thedral roof. Skulls have an unpleasant habit of looking sardonic. This retained a serene humah expression such as I never saw in any other. As I gazed upon the sharply cut features, they suddenly seemed familiar, and I had that odd feeling, which often comes to me in ca- thedral towns in England, and especially dur- ing my walks through the older sections of old London--the impression of having once been a part of it all, as perhaps I was in some remote period. At this instant, with my very touch upon a tangible something of that paunt- ing Past--at this instant, I repeat, the dingy the life that is, slipped away from me, and I was standing on Tower Hill with a throng of other men-at-arms, keeping back the motely London rabble at the point of our halberds-- rude, ill-begot knaves, that ever rejoice at the downfall of their betters. It is a shrewish win: ter morning, and nipping airs creep up, url wanted, from the river; for we have been standing here these three hours, chilled to the bone, under the bend of that sullen sky. Fit weather for such work, say L cdrcely a day, now, but a' head falls. Within 'the fortnight my Lord Guilford, and the Lady Jane,--and she only in her fewers,--and others hastening on! 'T is best not be born too near the purple. Perhaps 't were better not be born at all. What times are theése!--with the king's death, and the plottings, and the burnings, and the bodies of men hanging from gibbets every- where, in Southwark and Westminster, at Temple Bar and Charing Cross--upwards of twenty score of 'silly fellows that had no more brains than to dabble in sedition at mad Wyatt's bidding. Kings come and go," but Smithfield fires die not down. Now the Cath- olic burns, and now the heretic--and both for God's glory. Methinks the sum of evil done in this world through malice is small by side of the evil done with purblind good intent. "Twixt fool and knave, the Knave is the safer man. There's no end to the foolishness of the fool, but the knave hath his limits. The very want of wit that stops the one keeps the other-a-going.Ah, will it-ever-be-merry Eng- land again, when a mortal may eat his crust and drink his pint without fear of halter or fagot? What with the cruel bishops; and the wild gospelers,--crazy folk, alll--and this threatened Spanish marriage, peace is not Tike to come. Why should English Mary be so set to wed with a black Spaniard! How got she such a bee ip her bonnet to sting us all? Hark! From somewhere in the Tower the sound of a tolling bell is blown to us across the open. At last! A gate is flung back, and through the archway advances a little group of men. The light sparkles on the breastplates and meorions of the guards in front. The rest are in sad-colored clothes. In that group, me- thinks, are two or three that need be in no hot haste to get here! On they come, slowly, solemnly, between the double lines of steel, the spearmen and the archers. ' Nearer and nearer, pausing not, nor hurrying. And now they reach the spot. : How pale' my lord is, holding in his hand a lemon stuck with cloves for his refreshment! And yet he wears a brave front. In days that were not heavy like this day my lord knew me right well, for I have many a time ridden behind him to the Duke of Northumbetland's country-seat, near Isleworth by the-Thames. Perchance 't was even there, at Syon House, they spun the web that tripped them--and I not sniffing treason the while! My lord was nation to fancy that he had | not wise to mix himself in such dark inatters. ; Making a furtive mo-|{ I pray he 'make & fair end of it, like to that tion of one hand to his forehead by way of | salute, the man threw open a second door and | arched space) angel his daughter, who, though no queen, poor soul! laid down her life in queenly fas- hion. These great folk, who have everything soft to make their beds of,--so they throw it not aways--have somehow learned to die as ral tall, Lstoutly as any of the baser, sort, who are ac- customed. May it be so with my lord! He motions as if he would speak to the mul- itude. Listen! ' Yes, thank God! he will die Protestant; and so, stand back, Sir Priest! He hath no use for thy ghostly services. Stand back! (I breathe this only to myself, else were my neck not worth a ha'penny!) Thus did she wish it in her prayers, the Lady Jane; thus did slie beg him to comport himseli--she, at this hour a ten days' saint in heaven. Death shall not turn him from his faith, he says-- it. Ah, Master Luther,' what a brave sced thou hast sown in Wyclif's furrow! And now the headsman kneels to beg "God forgive 'thee, as Zutphen. The piece de résistance was clearly |] do," he answers gently, and no tremble in the that head which, three centuries and more ago, | voice! 1 could weep, were I not a queen's man had had so little discretion as to get itself |and under-officer, and dared do it. chopped off. I was beginning to query if the whole thing were not a fable, when Blount, And now he binds a handkerchief aboiit his eyes, and now he kneels him to the block. Taking down a key suspended against the! church, and Blount, and the verger, and all of Once more his lips move in speech. What is it he saith? "Lord, into thy hands I com- mand my spirit!""-- "What you 'ear rattling, sir," observed the verger, "is a tooth that't dropped hinside. 1 keeps it there for a curiosity. It,seems to hadd to the hinterest." - : The spell was broken, but the rigid face that confronted me there in the dim light was 2 face 1 had known in a foregone age. The bit- ter morning on Tower Hill, the surging multi- tude, the headsman with his ax--it was not a dream; it was a memory! | Since this sketch was written, the Church of Holy Trinity has been demolished. His Grace the Duke has consequently sought a domicile elsewhere. i Not Destruction, But Replacement. Toronto World. Rev. C. H. Shortt has been relating his ex- eriences as a missionary in Japan and has , said that those who have accepted western | learning and western ways have, for the most | part, lost their old faith and have replaced it , with nothing except a noble system of ethics. "And we missionaries," he continues," are not engaged in pulling down the fabriés of the an- cient religions; our hands are filled wth the very arduous task of converting to Christianity those who have abandoned every form of re- ligious belief." Mr. Shortt has made clear a distinction not always apparent to the westerti mind, the sharp and vital one between western civilization so- called and Christianity. A man eof any country may be civilized, and may continue in his own natural religion, or he may adopt an- other religion. *As a rule, the man deserting a particular religion of the truth of which he has been convinced, abandons all. This is the problem of missionary effort, but there are few missionaries who have the courage of Mr. Shortt to admit it. His" picture of young Japanese students weary of earth and flying to self-slaughter, is one of the gravest of situa- tions. When the Japanese delegates returned from the World's Congress of 'Religions, in 1893, the Japanese priests seriously considered the advisability of sending Buddhist missionaries to America, after the abounding wickedness of this continent had been described to them. Our civilization is a material one. Material istic thought has governed our work-a-day views for two generations. Only during the last generation has there been a return to the saner view of man's spiritual origin, his im- mortality, his unity with the cosmic powers, and His infinite destiny. Civilization, so-called, has tended to obscure these conceptions in Christendom, as it does in other lands, for religion may have just as spiritnal a basis under one form as under another. When the missionaries make it clear that L-Christianity does not seek to take away the spiritual solace that other religions afford, but rather to add to it, more progress will be made. A course of study in comparative re- ligion would, in fact, be an essévtial in sound missionary training. The early Christian apos- tles and evangelists would have made little way with 'the Jews had they ignored the Old Testament. No student of the New Testament can ever forget the magnificent directness of St. Paul's appeal--'As certain also of your own poets have said." ---------- Hospice of St. Bernard. Dealing with the rescue dogs of St. Bernard, the World Wide Magazine states. that the famous hospice was founded in 962 by Bernard de Menthon, a neighboring nobleman, for the benefit of -pilgrims journeying to Ronte. For many years it was continually being at- tacked by robbers who infested the mountains. The brave monks were compelled at times to barricade the doors and wait until the weather drove the besiegers away before they dared venture forth. Once it was destroyed by fire, while it was there that Napoleon was enter- tained when He took his army over the Alps into Italy in 1800. One hundred and eighty of his soldiers held the pass for a year. Tourists visiting the hospice from Western Europe naturally ascend the path on the Swiss side. The last village passed is Bourg St. Pierre, and at the inn there the landlord will point with pride to the tiny table and cloth- covered arm-chair used by the great soldier as he sat at breakfast before he set out on that memorable journey across the Alps. His army numbered thirty thousand men, and for miles they had literally to fight their way, foot by foot, waist-deep in snow. Napoleon converted the hospice into barracks, and the great room where travellers are now sheltered was turned into a huge hospital ward. Father Darbellay says that-the rescue dogs frequently remain out on the mountains search- ing for lost travellers for fifteen, eighteen and even twenty-four hours at a stretch. "On one occasion," he writes, "we went down the pass to seek some travellers who, we knew, could not possibly find their way, as it was snowing liard, bitterly cold and very dark. We sent three dogs on ahead. Presently we heard one barking, and found the animal pawing away in the snow. Digging, we came across the body of a man. We gave him some wine and bis- cuits. Hearing another dog barking, I was hastening away when the animal 'that had found the first man gripped me by the coat and pulled me over in the snow, 1 wondered what was the matter, and discovered with the aid of a lantern, that I was on the brink of a precipice; the dog had saved me from stepping over to my death. On this particular hunt we found eight persons, including on¢"woman and a little child. The latter was veggmweak and ill. One of the brethren removed his outer coat, wrapped the child in it, tied it to the back of one of the dogs, and sent it over to the hospice." There is one room in the hospice, however, which makes the traveller shudder and turn away. It is the morgue. Through the low- latticed bars of the window one can .gaze at the dead within. The keen air, sweeping from end to end, preserves the poor relics of hu- manity for years in a semi-mummified con- dition, and unless they are identified there they remain. There are twenty bodies in the mor- gue, one of which has been there fifty years. The Public Neglect Scored. The poet, William Watson, in a fiery letter to the London Times charging the British nation with being uninterested and unmoved by the tragedy of John Davidson's disappear- ance, declares that the noted poet died because he could not make a living. "His blood is upon us as surely as if we had slain him with our hands. He goes to an unknawn grave in the last bitterness of despair. It is another addition to the long list of tragedies which be-| gan with Spencer and did not end with the | death of Chatterton." Davidsén had a pen- sion but it was not sufficient to meet his needs. luck to the possessor MARVELLOUS MEMORIES. In China This Art is Being Still Cpltivated-- Lost to Other Nytions. The art of remembering is lost. Books that thé modern man cherishes he can easily pos- sess, and facts desired fo' future use he finds in books of reference or card catalogues. Only in China, and among devotees of esoteric re- ligions is memory above par. Every Chinese scholar worthy of the name for two thousand years has known the Five Books of Confucius so nearly by rote that if every copy was des- troyed a thousand could be taken immediately from memory. The Five Books are printed in many volumes, and with the commentaries of Mencius make a library in themselves; yet $0 well are they textually known among the literati that it is an insult--which well-meaning foreigners anxious to display their learning frequently commit--to refer to a passage any- where in any of them except by the mention of a word or two. The text of all is as well known to the scholars as is the passage, "To be or not to be" to Shakespearean scholars. Macauley once boasted that if Milton and Virgil and Homer were destroyed, the poets could be taken down verbatim again from his dictation. About a thousand years ago such a necessity arose in China. A great Emperor ordered the classics and commentaries utterly destroyed. Those who clung to their books more than to their lives were executed and their books burned. The catastrophe was well- nigh complete. The next Emperor, however, favored the learning of the literati and him- self ordered the texts restored from the mem- ories of the learned. 'The catalogue of classic books includes more than thirty-two hundred titles in many thousands of volumes, and of these a very great many have been preserved to posterity solely by the memories of those old men. , Now the Bible is the best memorized Book in the world, and it could be reconstructed from the minds of students. One young wo- man could dictate the New Testament. She is Miss Leste May Williams, of North Carolina, twenty years old. Early in March, 1905, Rev. J. A. Brendell offered two Bibles as 'prizes for memorizing scripture. The first was for those over twelve yéars old, and the second for those under that age. Miss Williams recited to the committee 12,236 verses of Scripture, covering the entire New Testament excepting the two genealogies of Jesus in the first chapter of Matthew and the third chapter of Luke, and including liberal selections from Genesis, Psalms, Ecclesiastes, and other parts of the Old Testament. The New Testament itself contains 7,959 verses and 190,000 words. Miss Williams' sister Ella, eleven years old, won the prize for the younger children, reciting seven hundred and fifteen ver The winner of the first prize performed her mnemonic feat in ninety days, during which she had an attack of the 'measles. She had averaged about one hundred and thirty-five verses daily. The most frequent cases of wonderful mem- ories are found among mathematical prodigies. These usually develop this remarkable faculty quite young, and in later life sink into very ordinary individuals. The phenomenon has never been explained; but there are several well-attested instances of genuine marvels of this kind. Dr. Macklin used to tell a story of a man proud of his mental reténtiveness. He offered to give any proof desired, and was asked to read a newspaper and then to repeat it from memory. The host held the paper while the man repeated it verbatim and every word in its proper place. The surprise was even greater and scepticism taxed beyond bounds when the visitor, to, show how easy the feat had been, offered t& répeat the words backward. And he did it. Beginning at the end of the last word of the last column, he went to the beginning of the first word of the first column without an error, Depth Of Desolation. A traveller, who returned in April from Italy, describes Messina, in the heart of the district devastated by earthquake in December as a most desolate and terrible spot imagined. "It is as if a giant hand had swept the build- ings down like a city built of cards. It is all a broad expanse of level .ruins, giving, the visitor a feeling of horror indescribable. The people are so stunned by the terrible blow that practically no effort has been made to restore the city or even to clear away the debris." The only paths through the ruins are those made by the American, English, French and other foreign marines during the days immediately following the disaster. It is 'estimat that there are still 3,000 bodies in-.the ruins, al- though many thousands have been taken out. Many persons believe that the remains of the unfortunates that are .still buried may have been consumed by the action of the rains upon the lime contained in the buildings. Those buildings were of the frailest character. Most of them were built around a front of stone, and when this gave way the whole flimsy struc- ture collapsed. No person caught in them had the slightest chance of escape." Lord's Prayer In Scotch. To the average Scotchman the English form over the border sounds cold and formal. The poems of Robeft Burns gain half their charm from the Scots' dialect which was natural to him. When he tries to write in English, his work is often void of charm. It is very natural that in prayer the Scotch- man should use the familiar speech of every day rather than the forms which he has ac- quired by study. Thus has arisen the Scotch version of the Lord's Prayer. Though in the churches the prayer is read from the King James version, yet the Scotchman in his heart always phrases it as follows: Faither o' us a' biding aboon. Thy name be holie. Let thy reign begin. Let thy wull de dune baith in yirth an' heaven. Gie us ilka day oor neediu feedin. An forgie us a oor illdeeds as we een forgie thae. wha hae dune us ill. An let us no be siftit, but save us frae the ill ane. For the croon is thine ain, an the micht and the glorie for evir an evir, Amen. Easter Hare Pie Scramble. In Leicestershire, in England, there is a custom still in vogue "tie Easter hare pie scramble." So many years ago that everybody has forgotten it a certain plot of ground was given to the rector of the parish on the condition that each year on Easter Monday he and his successors should contribute two hare or rabbit pies and a quan- tity of ale to be scrambled for by the villagers. As late as 1892 the "hare pie scramble" was ob- served as a great festival, all the villagers turn- ing out to march in procession behind the men carrying the hare pies, cut up into fragments. When they reachéd a spot known traditionally as "Hare Pie Bank" the sacks were emptied and all the crowd engéged in a fight or scramble for the pies, which were supposed to guarantee good for"the ensuing year. Fit-Reform 3 Button Sack N° matter what other styles may come and go, many men cling to this one style-- the 3 button Sack. So here is the universal favorite, but better than ever this spring.' We illustrate a Fit-Reform model which will add to the appearance of any man. It shows how much style can be put into a sack suit. The materials are elegant English Worsteds in a splendid variety of patterns and effects. The prices range from $20 to $30. Tit CRAWFORD & WALSH Sole Agents for Kingéton. SHOE POLISH BRIGHT AND INSTANTANEOUS One application--two rubs--and . your shoes are shined for three days. "2 in 1" softens the leather-- keeps out moisture--won't stain the clothes--and emanci- pates you from bottles, mops, brushes and hard work. No substitute even half as good. 10c. and 25c¢. Tins Every Woman who keeps house should know the "St. Lawrence" Sugars St. Lawrence "Granulated" St. Lawrence "Golden Yellows" St. Lawrence "Extra Ground" + . or Icing Sugar St. Lawrence "Powdered Sugar" Each of these brands 'is guaranteed absolutely pure, and the choicest Sugar of its kind in the Dominion. : Remember to order "St. Lawrence Sugar, whenever you buy. The ST. LAWRENCE, SUGAR REFINING COMPANY, &

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