e
ready, De Echingham."

Reginald obeyed, but grumbling bitterly within his disappointed soul.
Could there be any misery on earth worse than a cold stone bench, a bowl
of sorrel soup, and a chapter of Saint Augustine to flavour it? And
when they had only just touched the very edge of the London season!
Why, he would not get a single ball that spring. Poor Reginald!

They stayed but one night at Berkhamsted, though, to the Earl,
Berkhamsted was home. It was the scene of his birth, and of that
blessed unapprehensive childhood, when brothers and sisters had played
with him on the Castle green, and light, happy laughter had rung through
the noble halls; when the hand of his fair Provencal mother had fallen
softly in caresses on his head, and his generous, if extravagant, father
had been only too ready to shower gold ducats in anticipation of his
slightest wish. All was gone now but the cold gold--hard, silent,
unfeeling; a miserable comforter indeed. There was one brother left,
but he was far away--too far to recall in this desolate hour. Like a
sufferer of later date, he must go alone with his God to bear his
passion. [Note 1.]

The Priory of Ashridge--of the Order of Bonihomines--which Earl Edmund
had founded a few years before, was the only one of its class in
England. The Predicant Friars were an offshoot of the Dominican Order;
and the Boni-Homines were a special division of the Predicant Friars.
It is a singular fact that from this one source of Dominicans or Black
Monks, sprang the best and the worst issues that ever emanated from
monachism--the Bonihomines and the Inquisition.

The Boni-Homines were, in a word, the Protestants of the Middle Ages.
And--a remarkable feature--they were not, like all other seceders,
persons who had separated themselves from the corruptions of Rome. They
were better off, for they had never been tainted with them. From the
first ages of primitive Christianity, while on all sides the stream was
gradually growing sluggish and turbid, in the little nest of valleys
between Dauphine and Piedmont it had flowed fresh and pure, fed by the
Word of God, which the Vaudois [Note 2] mountaineers suffered no Pope
nor Church to wrench or shut up from them.

The oldest name by which we know these early Protestants is Paulikians,
probably having a reference to the Apostle Paul as either the exponent
of their doctrines, or the actual founder of their local church. A
little later we find th