"Now tell me who says I did the shooting." "I never heard of him before. Sovine, I believe his name is."

"Dave Sovine? W'y, he 's the son of old Bill Sovine; he 's the boy that ran off four years ago, don't you remember? He's the blackleg that won all my money. What does he want to get me hanged for? I paid him all I owed him.”

Lincoln did not appear to hear what Tom was saying he sat now with his eyes fixed on the grating, lost in thought.

"Tom," he said at length, "who was that strapping big knock-down fellow that used to be about your place-hunter, fisherman, fistfighter, and all that?"

"Do you mean Bob McCord ?” "That must be the man. Big Bob, they called him. He's friendly to you, is n't he?" "Oh, yes!"

"Well, you have Big Bob come to see me next Tuesday at the tavern, as I go back. I'll be there to dinner. And if you are called to the inquest, you have only to tell the truth. We won't make any fight before the coroner: you'll be bound over anyhow, and it's not best to show our hand too soon."

With that he took his leave. When he got out of the prison he found Mrs. Grayson and Barbara waiting to see him.

"Well, Aunt Marthy," he said, "it don't seem to me that your boy killed that fellow. It's going to be hard to clear him, but he did n't do it. I'll do my best. You must get all Tom's relations to come to the trial. And have Big Bob McCord come to see me next Tuesday."

The influence of Tom's uncle, judiciously directed by Hiram Mason, secured for the accused permission to remain in the light room of the prison in the day-time with manacles

on, and to sleep in the dungeon at night without the manacles. And the influence of Janet secured from Tom's aunt the loan of the clean though ancient and well-worn bedding and bed-linen that had been afforded him during his stay in his uncle's house. This was set up in the dark room of the jail in place of the bed that had been a resting-place for villains almost ever since the town was founded.

Understanding that Tom was to be taken to the coroner's inquest that afternoon, Hiram tried to persuade the sheriff to take him to Perrysburg jail at night for safety; for he had no knowledge of Bob McCord's plan for sending the mob there. But Plunkett refused this. He knew that such a change might offend Broad Run in case it should take a notion to enforce law in its own way, and Broad Run was an important factor in an election for county officers. Plunkett felt himself to be a representative sheriff. The voters of Broad Run and others of their kind had given him his majority, and he was in his place to do their will. Elevation to office had not spoiled him; he recognized in himself a humble servant of the people, whose duty it was to enforce the law whenever it did not conflict with the wishes of any considerable number of his "constituents." To his mind it did not appear to be of much consequence that a man who deserved hanging should receive his merited punishment at the hands of a mob, instead of suffering death according to the forms of law, after a few weeks or months of delay. But he was too cautious to reveal to Mason the true state of his mind; he only urged that the removal of Tom to Perrysburg would be an act of timidity that might promote the formation of a mob while it would not put Tom out of their reach; and this Mason could not deny. Edward Eggleston.

A. S. L. Gray.

HE architectural record of the great church which stands at Salisbury is unique among the records of English cathedrals. Its foundations were laid upon a virgin site in the year 1220; thirty-eight years thereafter it stood complete up to the top of the first stage of its tower; and time respected the unity thus achieved. No great calamity brought ruin upon any part of the structure, and no new needs provoked its alteration. A single style rules it from end to end, inside and out, from foundation-course to roof-crest. Only the spire and the upper stages of the tower were added in a later century, and to most observers even these look of a piece with all the rest.

It was by means of an act of transplantation, however, and not of new creation, that its thirteenth-century builders had the chance thus to make Salisbury Cathedral all their own. The body of their church was new and the spot upon which it stood, but in name and soul it had already long existed.

I.

ABOUT the year 705 the great diocese of Winchester was divided and its western portion formed into the diocese of Sherborne. In the tenth century this in its turn was cut into two or three, one being called Ramsbury or Wiltshire. At the time of the Conquest Bishop Herman occupied the chairs of both Ramsbury and Sherborne. As he was a foreigner by birth William did not dispossess him; and when William's council decreed the removal of isolated rural sees to places of more importance, Herman removed his to Old Sarum, and the names of the two earlier dioceses were lost in that of Salisbury.

Old Sarum, we say to-day. The Romans said Sorbiodunum, the English Searobyrig, or Sarisbyrig. Sarum was merely the Latinized medieval term which in the thirteenth century was applied to the neighboring new town as well as to the old. Now we call the former Salisbury, but the prefix we still use in speaking of the other perpetuates the memory of the time when they were namesakes.

From prehistoric days Old Sarum had been a strong and famous place. Nature had made it conspicuous in the levels around it, and successive races of men had fortified it to the best of their power. No spot in all England is of

more curious interest now. In this crowded little land we soon learn to expect that every historic site will show signs of modern life, that in every spot where a building has stood some building will still stand-if not perfect, then in ruins; or if not the first building, then a later. Who looks in England to find a mighty place of old turned into such a "heap" as those cities of the plain whose punishment the prophets foresaw? Who expects to see the sheep feeding and the plowshare turning where there have been not only Roman roads and ramparts but a great Norman castle and a Cathedral church? Yet this, and nothing but this, is what we see at Old Sarum.

Its broad, desolate hill lies isolated in the valley near the river Avon,* not very far from the skirts of the great table-land called Salisbury Plain. Even the roadway leaves it at a distance. First we pass through an inn-garden, then cross a long stretch of slightly rising ground, and then climb successive steep and rugged though grassy slopes. These show in scarcely broken lines the trend of the ancient walls and fosses. Their main portions are of Roman origin, but, if we may believe tradition, the outermost line was added by King Alfred when the Danes were on the war-path. Once on top of the hill, we find it a wide, rolling plateau, bearing here and there a group of trees, but nowhere a building, and only in two places any relic of man's handiwork-only two shattered, ragged bits of wall. Most of it is covered with rough grass, very different from the fresh turf of English lowlands, but far off to the westward there are signs of agricultural labor. This was where the great cathedral stood; and how much else once stood where now is an almost Mesopotamian desolation-all the adjuncts of a cathedral, ecclesiastical and domestic; all the parts of a stronghold that was a royal residence as well; and all the streets and structures of a considerable city, stretching down the hill and out into the valley. Hence, as from an important center, once radiated six Roman roads. Here Briton and Saxon fought, and the victors held their parliaments, and were in their turn assaulted by the Dane. Hither were summoned all the states of the realm to do homage to William the Norman, and, a century later, all its great men to pay reverence to that young son of

*This is not Shakspere's Avon, but another of the name which flows southward to the Channel.

Henry I. who was to perish in the wreck of the "White Ship." Here was drawn up the "Ordinal of Offices for the Use of Sarum" which became the ritual rule for the whole south of England. Here, in a word, for centuries and under the dominion of five successive races - British, Roman, English, Norman, and again in the new sense English-was one of the great centers of ecclesiastical and military power. To-day it is nothing but a heap. Citadel and lordly keep, royal hall and chapel, cathedral, chapter-house and close, convents, parish churches, municipal buildings, burghers' homes and streets, and the mighty walls which once inclosed them, all have been swept away,— their very stones removed for use in distant spots. The colossal earthworks which once bore the walls are not greatly damaged; the little village of Stratford-under-the-Castle marks perhaps the site of a valley suburb; and the two forlorn patches of wall may still stand for generations. But above ground Nature has reclaimed all else to barren unity. Below ground a long passage is known to exist, though its entrance has been closed for a century, and in 1835 curious antiquaries laid bare for a moment the foundations of the cathedral church. It was 270 feet in length, and had two western towers with a great Galilee-porch between, transepts and aisles, and a deep choir which, as was usual in later English but not in Norman days, ended in a flat east wall. It was consecrated in the year 1092, and was begun by Herman, finished by his successor Osmund, a companion of the Conqueror, and much altered and enlarged by Roger, the warriorbishop of King Stephen's time. It seems to have been inclosed by the fortifications of the castle, and this fact typifies all those which led to its eventual abandonment.

From the beginning, the close association of ecclesiastical and military power was a source of trouble. At Durham the bishop had been the first comer and was indisputable head of the community, and the might of the sword always assisted the might of the staff. But the bishop of Sherborne and Ramsbury came to Sarum, so to say, as the guest and dependent of its military chief. Some of his successors united both titles—as in the case of the bloody and potent Roger. But from Roger's day onward church and castle were at feud, and the burghers of Sarum, who were tenants in part of the one and in part of the other, fed and fanned the discord. Municipal disputes were then not settled by words. Hand-to-hand struggles were frequent in Sarum, and naturally the priests did not often have the best of the matter. In the reign of Richard I., for instance, "such was the hot entertainment on

each part" over certain disputed boundaries "that at last the Castellanes, espieing their time, gate between the cleargie and the towne and so coiled them as they returned homeward that they feared any more to gang about their bounds for the year." Moreover, the cathedral establishment was sadly cramped for space, the town "wanted water so unreasonably as [a strange kind of merchandise] it was there to be sold," the hill was cold and cheerless and the wind blew over the lifted church so that often "the people could not hear the priests say mass." And then, on general principles, "What," as one of its canons exclaimed, "has the house of the Lord to do with castles? It is the ark of the covenant in a temple of Baalim. Let us in God's name," he added, "descend into the level. There are rich champaigns and fertile valleys abounding in the fruits of the earth and profusely watered by living streams. There is a seat for the Virgin patroness of our Church to which the whole world cannot afford a parallel." Times had changed since that distraught eleventh century, when such spots as Durham and Sarum had seemed the best for churchmen's homes. What they wanted now was not convenience of defense, but freedom of access and the chance to live well, since anywhere they could live in safety. So, in the reign of Henry III. and the bishopric of Richard Poore, the first stones of a new cathedral were laid in the valley. As it stood more than a mile away from the old one, we can perhaps as readily believe that the Virgin showed the spot to the bishop in a dream as that he marked it by an arrow shot from the ramparts of Old Sarum.

With the ecclesiastics went most of the burghers of the hill-town. At once its importance departed and, more slowly but as utterly, its very life. The stages of its decline cannot be traced with surety. But the mere fact that after the time of Bishop Poore history refers to it only seldom and as though by chance proves how quickly it died. A writer who visited it in 1540 says that not a house then remained, that the castle was a heap of "notable ruinous building," and that in a chapel dedicated to Our Lady burned the only lights which proved man's presence. Nominally Old Sarum existed as a town until the year 1831. Until then two so-called representatives of its chimerical inhabitants sat in the Parliament of England. But for years out of mind it had then been as invisible as it is to-day. Perhaps when the priests shook off its inhospitable dust they cursed it as the Hebrew priests had cursed the cities of the plain.

As it gradually dwindled, the new city of priests waxed and grew, absorbing its lifeblood, stealing away the stones of its body.

APART from its great central feature the modern Salisbury is not an interesting town. The main streets are commonplace, though in out-of-the-way corners we find picturesque bits of domestic work and a Perpendicular church or two; and while the chief square is spacious, it has scarcely more architectural dignity than that of some New England city of the second rank. Doubtless it was once more interesting-the scene-painter bids us think so when "Richard III." is being played and the time comes for Buckingham's execution. Beyond the suburbs, however, out in the valley of the Avon, the England of today is as lovely as ever, and from here the town seems a pretty enough base for the splendid spire which soars above it. All possible adjectives of description and nouns of com

parison have been worn threadbare in the attempt to paint this spire. But no words can do the work. To call it a "titanic arrow weakly pictures the way it lifts itself, seemingly not towards but into the blue of heaven. To liken it to the " spear of an angel" does not figure the strength which dwells in its buoyant outline. We may speak of it for the thousandth time as a silent "finger of faith" pointing to the home of the faithful and not hint at the significance it wears to the imaginative eye, or cite with emphasis the many feet it measures and not explain the paramount place it holds in the landscape - how it is always the center and finish of every scene, whether we stand far away or near; how it persists in our consciousness even when our backs are turned, or when the blackness of night shuts it out from corporeal vision. Standing just beneath it, we cannot but keep our eyes perpetually lifted to its aërial summit, to mark how the moving clouds appear to be at rest and it appears to move-like a gigantic, lovely dial-hand actually showing us for once the invisible revolution of the globe. When we are far away, on the desolate levels of Salisbury Plain, we see its isolated, slender stateliness for miles after town and church have vanished beneath the plateau's edge; and when it also disappears it still seems to be watching us—it is still the one thing with which imagination takes account until we are finally in presence of that huge circle at Stonehenge, in comparison with the antiquity of which Salisbury's spire is modern. The whole of architectural progress lies between the forms of these two famous monuments. Here are rough, unhewn, uncouth monoliths, raised by brute strength and standing by the force of mere inertia — there, delicately chiseled blocks piled in myriads one upon another to a dizzy height, the utmost science and the subtilest art creating and maintaining them. Here is the impressiveness of matter subdued by mind into positions full once of a meaning that now is lost but not subdued into even the remotest semblance of grace or beauty. There a strength infinitely greater is combined with the last word of grace and loveliness, and expresses meanings, faiths, emotions, which are still those of our own world. Yet there is no undecipherable stage in the long sequence which lies between. The steps are close and clearnot, indeed, in England, but in other lands that we know as well-which lead from men who were content to set two great stones over against each other and lay a third on top and call them a temple, to men who caressed their stones into exquisite forms and surfaces, piled them aloft in complicated harmonies of outline, and crowned them with pinnacles — as