the warden (a false knave, whom I suspect to be bribed for the nonce) saw himself forced to give the alarm, which, perchance, till then he had willfully withheld. To atone, therefore, for my injustice toward you, I would willingly render you a courtesy, you would accept of it from my hands."

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May I first crave to know what it is?" replied the page. Simply to carry the news of this discovery to Holyrood, where thou mayest do thyself much grace, as well with the Earl of Morton and the Regent himself, as with Sir William Douglas, seeing thou hast seen the matter from end to end, and borne faithful part therein. The making thine own fortune will be thus lodged in thine own hand, when I trust thou wilt estrange thyself from foolish vanities, and learn to walk in this world as one who thinks upon the next."

"Sir Steward," said Roland Graeme, "I thank you for your courtesy, but I may not do your errand. I pass that I am the Queen's sworn servant, and may not be of counsel against her. But, setting this apart, methinks it were a bad road to Sir William of Lochleven's favor to be the first to tell him of his son's defection - neither would the Regent be over well pleased to hear the infidelity of his vassal, nor Morton to learn the falsehood of his kinsman."

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Um!" said the steward, making that inarticulate sound which expresses surprise mingled with displeasure. “Nay, then, even fly where ye list; for, giddy-pated as ye may be, you know how to bear you in the world.'

"I will show you my esteem is less selfish than ye think for," said the page; "for I hold truth and mirth to be better than gravity and cunning-ay, and in the end to be a match for them. You never loved me less, Sir Steward, than you do at this moment. I know you will give me no real confidence, and I am resolved to accept no false protestations as current coin. Resume your old course-suspect me as much and watch me as closely as you will, I bid you defiance-you have met with your match."

"By Heaven, young man," said the steward, with a look of bitter malignity, "if thou darest to attempt any treachery toward the House of Lochleven, thy head shall blacken in the sun from the warder's turret !

"He cannot commit treachery who refuses trust," said the page; "and for my head, it stands as securely on my shoulders, as on any turret that ever mason built."

“Farewell, thou prating and speckled pie," said Dryfesdale, "thou art so vain of thine idle tongue and variegated coat! Beware trap and lime twig."

"And fare thee well, thou hoarse old raven," answered the page; "thy solemn flight, sable hue, and deep croak are no charms against birdbolt or hailshot, and that thou mayest find-it is open war betwixt us, each for the cause of our mistress, and God show the right!"

"Amen, and defend his own people!" said the steward. "I will let my mistress know what addition thou hast made to this mess of traitors. Good night, Monsieur Featherpate." "Good night, Seignior Sowersby," replied the page; and, when the old man departed, he betook himself to rest.

THREE PHASES OF ENGLISH HISTORY.

BY JOHN RICHARD GREEN.

[JOHN RICHARD GREEN, English historian, was born at Oxford in 1837; graduated at Jesus College; became a clergyman, and in 1868 librarian to the Archbishop of Canterbury at Lambeth. His earliest bent was toward studying the gems of English history, and after many short papers his "Short History of the English People" (1874) made him famous. In spite of an incurable disease and great weakness, and of ardent service in practical church work, he published "The Making of England" in 1882, and had nearly completed "The Conquest of England" (completed and published by his widow) when he died, March 7, 1883. He published some other works, and suggested the English Historical Review.]

THE PRIMITIVE TEUTONS.

FOR the fatherland of the English race we must look far away from England itself. In the fifth century after the birth of Christ the one country which we know to have borne the name of Angeln or England lay within the district which is now called Sleswick, a district in the heart of the peninsula that parts the Baltic from the northern seas. Its pleasant pastures, its black-timbered homesteads, its prim little townships looking down on inlets of purple water, were then but a wild waste of heather and sand, girt along the coast with a sunless woodland, broken here and there by meadows that crept down to the marshes and the sea. The dwellers in this district, how

ever, seem to have been merely an outlying fragment of what was called the Engle or English folk, the bulk of whom lay probably in what is now Lower Hanover and Oldenburg. On one side of them the Saxons of Westphalia held the land from the Weser to the Rhine; on the other, the Eastphalian Saxons stretched away to the Elbe. North again of the fragment of the English folk in Sleswick lay another kindred tribe, the Jutes, whose name is still preserved in their district of Jutland. Engle, Saxon, and Jute all belonged to the same Low German branch of the Teutonic family; and at the moment when history discovers them they were being drawn together by the ties of a common blood, common speech, common social and political institutions. There is little ground indeed for believing that the three tribes looked on themselves as one people, or that we can as yet apply to them, save by anticipation, the common name of Englishmen. But each of them was destined to share in the conquest of the land in which we live, and it is from the union of all of them when its conquest was complete that the English people has sprung.

Of the temper and life of the folk in this older England we know little. But from the glimpses that we catch of it when conquest had brought them to the shores of Britain their political and social organization must have been that of the German race to which they belonged. In their villages lay ready formed the social and political life which is round us in the England of to-day. A belt of forest or waste parted each from its fellowvillages, and within this boundary or mark the "township," as the village was then called, from the "tun" or rough fence and trench that served as its simple fortification, formed a complete and independent body, though linked by ties which were strengthening every day to the townships about it and the tribe of which it formed a part. Its social center was the homestead where the ætheling or eorl, a descendant of the first English settlers in the waste, still handed down the blood and traditions of his fathers. Around this homestead or æthel, each in its little croft, stood the lowlier dwellings of freelings or ceorls, men sprung, it may be, from descendants of the earliest settler who had in various ways forfeited their claim to a share in the original homestead, or more probably from incomers into the village who had since settled round it and been admitted to a share in the land and freedom of the community. The eorl was distinguished from his fellow-villagers by his wealth

and his nobler blood; he was held by them in a hereditary reverence; and it was from him and his fellow-æthelings that host leaders, whether of the village or the tribe, were chosen in times of war. But this claim to precedence rested simply on the free recognition of his fellow-villagers. Within the township every freeman or ceorl was equal. It was the freeman who was the base of village society. He was the "free-necked man," whose long hair floated over a neck which had never bowed to a lord. He was the "weaponed man," who alone bore spear and sword, and who alone preserved that right of self-redress or private war which in such a state of society formed the main check upon lawless outrage.

Among the English, as among all the races of mankind, justice had originally sprung from each man's personal action. There had been a time when every freeman was his own avenger. But even in the earliest forms of English society of which we find traces this right of self-defense was being modified and restricted by a growing sense of public justice. The "blood-wite" or compensation in money for personal wrong was the first effort of the tribe as a whole to regulate private revenge. The freeman's life and the freeman's limb had each on this system its legal price. "Eye for eye," ran the rough code, and "life for life," or for each fair damages. We see a further step towards the modern recognition of a wrong as done not to the individual man but to the people at large in another custom of early date. The price of life or limb was paid, not by the wrongdoer to the man he wronged, but by the family or house of the wrongdoer to the family or house of the wronged. Order and law were thus made to rest in each little group of people upon the blood bond which knit its families together; every outrage was held to have been done by all who were linked in blood to the doer of it, every crime to have been done against all who were linked in blood to the sufferer from it. From this sense of the value of the family bond as a means of restraining the wrongdoer by forces which the tribe as a whole did not as yet possess sprang the first rude forms of English justice. Each kinsman was his kinsman's keeper, bound to protect him from wrong, to hinder him from wrongdoing, and to suffer with him and pay for him if wrong were done. So fully was this principle recognized that even if any man was charged before his fellow-tribesmen with crime his kinsfolk still remained in fact his sole judges,

for it was by their solemn oath of his innocence or his guilt that he had to stand or fall.

As the blood bond gave its first form to English justice, so it gave their first forms to English society and English warfare. Kinsmen fought side by side in the hour of battle, and the feelings of honor and discipline which held the host together were drawn from the common duty of every man in each little group of warriors to his house. And as they fought side by side on the field, so they dwelt side by side on the soil. Harling abode by Harling, and Billing by Billing; and each "wick” or “ham,” or "stead" or "tun" took its name from the kinsmen who dwelt together in it. In this way the home or "ham" of the Billings was Billingham, and the "tun" or township of the Harlings was Harlington. But in such settlements the tie of blood was widened into the larger tie of land. Land with the German race seems at a very early time to have become everywhere the accompaniment of full freedom. The freeman was strictly the freeholder, and the exercise of his full rights as a free member of the community to which he belonged became inseparable from the possession of his "holding" in it. But property had not as yet reached that stage of absolutely personal possession which the social philosophy of a later time falsely regarded as its earliest state. The woodland and pasture land of an English village were still undivided, and every free villager had the right of turning into it his cattle or swine. The meadow land lay in like manner open and undivided from hay harvest to spring. It was only when grass began to grow afresh that the common meadow was fenced off into grass fields, one for each household in the village; and when hay harvest was over fence and division were at an end again. The plow land alone was permanently allotted in equal shares both of corn land and fallow land to the families of the freemen, though even the plow land was subject to fresh division as the number of claimants grew greater or less.

It was this sharing in the common land which marked off the freeman or ceorl from the unfree man or læt, the tiller of land which another owned. As the ceorl was the descendant of settlers who, whether from their earlier arrival or from kinship with the original settlers of the village, had been admitted to a share in its land and its corporate life, so the læt was a descendant of later comers to whom such a share was denied, or in some cases, perhaps, of earlier dwellers from whom the land