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Rh had been perfectly dead four years. We took very good care not to come away too soon. Chaucer and Spenser were dead, too, and we had nothing to stay for!'"

I was obliged to relax here and give vent to a burst of merriment at Francesca's absurdities.

"I could see that he had never regarded the matter in that light before," she went on gayly, encouraged by my laughter, "but he braced himself for the conflict, and said, 'I wonder that you didn't stay a little longer while you were about it. Milton and Ben Jonson were still alive; Bacon's Novum Organum was just coming out; and in thirty or forty years you could have had L'Allegro, Il Penseroso, and Paradise Lost; Newton's Principia, too, in 1687. Perhaps these were all too serious and heavy for your national taste; still, one sometimes likes to claim things one cannot fully appreciate. And then, too, if you had once begun to stay, waiting for the great things to happen and the great books to be written, you would never have gone, for there would still have been Browning, Tennyson, and Swinburne to delay you.'

"'If we couldn't stay to see out your great bards, we certainly couldn't afford to remain and welcome your minor ones,' I answered frigidly; 'but we wanted to be well out of the way before England united with Scotland, knowing that if we were uncomfortable as things were, it would