is own brightened with a
glorious triumph, he exclaimed in the fullness of his rich-toned voice,
"I thank our Lord the field is won." It was no wonder that, overwhelmed
with apprehension, his son-in-law could not apprehend his meaning then,
but afterward bethought him that he signified how he had conquered the
world.

The abbot of Westminster took him that same day into custody, on his
refusal to "take the king as head of his Church;" and upon his repeating
this refusal four days afterward, he was committed to the Tower. Then,
indeed, these heretofore bowers of bliss echoed to the weak and wavering
complaints of his proud wife, who disturbed him also in his prison by
her desires, so vain and so worldly, when compared with the elevated
feelings of his dear daughter Margaret.

How did the fond, foolish woman seek to shake his purpose! "Seeing," she
said, "you have a house at Chelsea, a right fair house, your library,
your gallery, your garden, your orchard, and all other necessaries so
handsome about you, where you might in company with me, your wife, your
children, and household, be merry, I marvel that you who have been
always taken for so wise a man, can be content thus to be shut up among
mice and rats, and, too, when you might be abroad at your liberty, and
with the favor and good-will both of the king and his council, if you
would but do as all the bishops and best learned men of the realm have
done."

And then not even angered by her folly, seeing how little was given her
to understand, he asked her if the house in Chelsea was any nearer
Heaven than the gloomy one he then occupied? ending his pleasant yet
wise parleying with a simple question:

"Tell me," he said, "good Mistress Alice, how long do you think might we
live and enjoy that same house?"

She answered, "Some twenty years."

"Truly," he replied, "if you had said some thousand years, it might have
been somewhat; and yet he were a very bad merchant who would put himself
in danger to lose eternity for a thousand years. How much the rather if
we are not sure to enjoy it one day to an end?"

It is for the glory of women that his daughter Margaret, while she loved
and honored him past all telling, strengthened his noble nature; for,
writing him during his fifteen months' imprisonment in the Tower, she
asks, in words not to be forgotten, "What do you think, most dear
father, doth comfort us at Chelsey, in this your absence? Surely, the
remembrance of yo