y has fashioned
to the shape of the archangel blowing the last trump. His clarion
or coach-horn, or whatever instrument of music it was he blew, has
vanished. The parish book records that in the time of George I a boy
broke it off, melted it down, and was publicly flogged in consequence,
the last time, apparently, that the whipping-post was used. But Gabriel
still twists about as manfully as he did when old Peter, the famous
smith, fashioned and set him up with his own hand in the last year of
King Henry VIII, as it is said to commemorate the fact that on this spot
stood the stakes to which Cicely Harflete, Lady of Blossholme, and her
foster-mother, Emlyn, were chained to be burned as witches.

So it is with everything at Blossholme, a place that Time has touched
but lightly. The fields, or many of them, bear the same names and remain
identical in their shape and outline. The old farmsteads and the few
halls in which reside the gentry of the district, stand where they
always stood. The glorious tower of the Abbey still points upwards to
the sky, although bells and roof are gone, while half-a-mile away the
parish church that was there before it--having been rebuilt indeed
upon Saxon foundations in the days of William Rufus--yet lies among its
ancient elms. Farther on, situate upon the slope of a vale down which
runs a brook through meadows, is the stark ruin of the old Nunnery that
was subservient to the proud Abbey on the hill, some of it now roofed in
with galvanised iron sheets and used as cow-sheds.

It is of this Abbey and this Nunnery and of those who dwelt around them
in a day bygone, and especially of that fair and persecuted woman who
came to be known as the Lady of Blossholme, that our story has to tell.

It was dead winter in the year 1535--the 31st of December, indeed. Old
Sir John Foterell, a white-bearded, red-faced man of about sixty years
of age, was seated before the log fire in the dining-hall of his great
house at Shefton, spelling through a letter which had just been brought
to him from Blossholme Abbey. He mastered it at length, and when it was
done any one who had been there to look might have seen a knight and
gentleman of large estate in a rage remarkable even for the time of the
eighth Henry. He dashed the document to the ground; he drank three cups
of strong ale, of which he had already had enough, in quick succession;
he swore a number of the best oaths of the period, and finally, in
the