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24 tongues! No sins in the past; hopes gleaming through the future. Oh summer nights, on the glass of starry waves! Oh Youth, Youth!

was past nine o'clock in the evening of the following day. The exhibition at Mr. Rugge's theatre had closed for the season in that village, for it was the conclusion of the Fair. The final performance had been begun and ended somewhat earlier than on former nights. The theatre was to be cleared from the ground by day-break, and the whole company to proceed onward betimes in the morning. Another Fair awaited them in an adjoining county, and they had a long journey before them.

Gentleman Waife and his Juliet Araminta had gone to their lodgings over the cobbler's stall. The rooms were homely enough, but had an air not only of the comfortable, but the picturesque. The little sitting-room was very old-fashioned—paneled in wood that had once been painted blue—with a quaint chimney-piece that reached to the ceiling. That part of the house spoke of the time of Charles I. It might have been tenanted by a religious Roundhead; and framed-in over the low door there was a grim faded portrait of a pinched-faced saturnine man, with long lank hair, starched band, and a length of upper-lip that betokened relentless obstinacy of character, and might have curled in sullen glee at the monarch's scaffold, or preached an interminable sermon to the stout Protector. On a table, under the deep-sunk window, were neatly arrayed a few sober-looking old books; you would find among them Colley's Astrology, Owen Feltham's Resolves, Glanville on Witches, The Pilgrim's Progress, an early edition of Paradise Lost, and an old Bible; also two flower-pots of clay brightly reddened, and containing stocks; also two small worsted rugs, on one of which rested a carved cocoa-nut, on the other an egg-shaped ball of crystal—that last the pride and joy of the Cobbler's visionary