Had ask'd us to their marriage, and to share Their marriage - banquet. Muriel, paler then

Than ever you were in your cradle, moan'd,
'I am fitter for my bed, or for my grave,
I cannot go, go you.' And then she rose,
She clung to me with such a hard embrace,
So lingeringly long, that half-amazed
I parted from her, and I went alone.
And when the bridegroom murmur'd,
With this ring,'

I felt for what I could not find, the key,
The guardian of her relics, of her ring.
I kept it as a sacred amulet

400

About me, gone! and gone in that embrace !

MIRIAM.

those two ghost lovers

FATHER.

Lovers yet

MIRIAM.

FATHER.

but dead so long, gone up so far, That now their ever-rising life has dwarf'd Or lost the moment of their past on earth, As we forget our wail at being born

As if

MIRIAM.

-a dearer ghost had

FATHER.

[Dean Milman has remarked that the protection and care afforded by the Church to this blighted race of lepers was among the most beautiful of its offices during the Middle Ages. The leprosy of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries was supposed to be a legacy of the Crusades, but was in all probability the offspring of meagre and unwholesome diet, miserable lodging and clothing, physical and moral degradation. The services of the Church in the seclusion of these unhappy sufferers were most affecting. The stern duty of looking to the public welfare is tempered with exquisite compassion for the victims of this loathsome disease. The ritual for the sequestration of the leprous differed little from the burial service. After the leper had been sprinkled with holy water, the priest conducted him into the church, the leper singing the psalm 'Libera me, Domine,' and the crucifix and bearer going before. In the church a black cloth was stretched over two trestles in front of the altar,