upon any one who should refuse to be a candidate for
sheriff, and a fine of L600 upon any person who, after being
elected sheriff, refused to serve. Then they went to work and
elected a lot of Dissenters, one after another, and kept it up
until they had collected L15,000 in fines; and there stands the
stately Mansion House to this day, to keep the blushing citizen
in mind of a long past and lamented day when a band of Yankees
slipped into London and played games of the sort that has given
their race a unique and shady reputation among all truly good
and holy peoples that be in the earth.

The girl's case seemed strong to me; the bishop's case was just
as strong. I did not see how the king was going to get out of
this hole. But he got out. I append his decision:

"Truly I find small difficulty here, the matter being even a
child's affair for simpleness. An the young bride had conveyed
notice, as in duty bound, to her feudal lord and proper master
and protector the bishop, she had suffered no loss, for the said
bishop could have got a dispensation making him, for temporary
conveniency, eligible to the exercise of his said right, and thus
would she have kept all she had. Whereas, failing in her first
duty, she hath by that failure failed in all; for whoso, clinging
to a rope, severeth it above his hands, must fall; it being no
defense to claim that the rest of the rope is sound, neither any
deliverance from his peril, as he shall find. Pardy, the woman's
case is rotten at the source. It is the decree of the court that
she forfeit to the said lord bishop all her goods, even to the
last farthing that she doth possess, and be thereto mulcted in
the costs. Next!"

Here was a tragic end to a beautiful honeymoon not yet three months
old. Poor young creatures! They had lived these three months
lapped to the lips in worldly comforts. These clothes and trinkets
they were wearing were as fine and dainty as the shrewdest stretch
of the sumptuary laws allowed to people of their degree; and in
these pretty clothes, she crying on his shoulder, and he trying
to comfort her with hopeful words set to the music of despair,
they went from the judgment seat out into the world homeless,
bedless, breadless; why, the very beggars by the roadsides were
not so poor as they.

Well, the king was out of the hole; and on terms satisfactory to
the Church and the rest of the aristocracy, no doubt. Men write
many fine and plausible ar