Page:Wit, humor, and Shakspeare. Twelve essays (IA cu31924013161223).pdf/293

 frontiers unsearched, and makes all the sects religious. The Catholic maiden, who has overheard that St. Bartholomew would have a bloody eve, puts the white sign of safety round the arm of her Huguenot lover; but the fingers of his sword-arm pull it off, though all the binding love in her face pleads for the dear deceit, and justifies it to all of his heart that is not dedicated to die with comrades. Her religion,—what is it but the sacrament that converts her adored one into the body and the blood of her life? Henceforth High Mass must celebrate for her a double sacrifice.

Shakspeare contrived to rear a race of women whose physical soundness was unimpaired. Before the gymnasium and the health-lift were invented at the peevish persuasion of dyspeptics and invalids, who die by inches of fried food, furnace-air, fricassees of high-school programmes, and ragouts of French novels, his women earned their health on horseback in the broad English fields: they called it down to them out of the sky, where the hawk struck the heron and returned to perch upon the wrist; they came upon its track in the sylvan paths which the startled deer extemporized; they overtook it in long stretches of breezy walks upon the heathery downs and in the hawthorn-bounded lane. The country's Nature was their training-room, and its unsophisticated habits their masters. They saw the sun rise, and could not afford time to outflare the setting crescent with gaslight streaming from overheated rooms; nor did the stately minuet ravage like the German which is sustained into the small hours upon rations of beef