his execution, to send to his son; but Louis XI., that strange compound of clear intellect and superstition, intercepted the messenger, and seized the treasure for himself. Numbers of great captains are stated to have worn bezoars; some under the cuirass, others on the helmet, and one or two on the sword-hilt. Charles IX., however, and his physician Ambrose Paré, to a great extent destroyed the reputation of the bezoar. That King being at Clermont in 1565, a Spanish noble presented him with one of these stones. Charles and Paré, eager to prove its much lauded efficacy, procured a criminal under sentence of death, and offered him pardon should he submit to and survive the experiment they meditated. Confident in the virtues of the bezoar, the wretch gladly consented-was dosed with corrosive sublimate, and then treated with bezoar internally and externally-but died in fearful torture within a very few hours. Thenceforth warriors betook them to other preservatives. The most common were papers inscribed with characters exceedingly holy, or the very reverse. Such a one was found in the pocket of the Irish Colonel Skelton, who was killed at the siege of Limerick, in 1691. This paper contained the drawing of a wound, made by a spearhead, and the following strange inscription:"This is the measure of the wounds of the side of our Saviour Jesus Christ, which was brought from Constantinople in a coffin of goulde, and is a most precious relique, to the end that he or she who carries the same about him, no fire nor water, no wind, tempest, knaife, lance, or soord, nor the Devil cannot hurt him; and the woman with child the day she seeth the same measure shall not die a sudden death; and if any man carry the same about him with good devotion shall have the honour and victory of his inimy. The day that any doth read the same or hear it read, shall not die an evil death. Amen."

Decidedly the most valued of these defences was the magic shirt. It was prepared as follows:-On Christmas Eve, three young girls, under seven years of age, were to spin a thread, weave it into cloth, and sew it into a shirt between sunset and sunrise. The shirt was to reach from the neck to the thigh, and to be without sleeve. On the breast were to be embroidered two crosses and two heads.

The head to the right was to wear a long beard and a helmet, and that to the left, "a crown resembling the crown worn by the devil." A shirt thus prepared was reputed invulnerable. Nor was this its only virtue. Females, it was believed, would find it even more powerful than the Irish talisman-especially if taken from the body of a dead man. For, says an antique dealer in this and other kinds of diablerie-"Contra vero tale inducum, vero tamen mortuo ereptum, a fœminis luxuriosis quæri ferunt; quo indutæ non amplius gravescere perhibentur." Both these qualities, but especially the latter, were supposed to be as strong in saintly rags, or in the chemise worn by witch or wizard at the hour of death. We cannot specify the origin of the magic shirt, but we can trace its use back into those pagan times when Angyntyr wielded the sword Tyrfing in vain against the impenetrable cassock of Udder. Bezoar, shirt, and scroll, were, however, liable to be detected, and removed in cases of judicial combat. This was a great drawback. But in time amulets were devised which defied the closest search. Some people, early in the forty days that preceded the conflict, causing their heads to be shaven, had characters of power traced on the bare poll, which the growth of the hair completely covered by the battle-day; others procured to be tattooed on their bodies characters ineradicable by any process short of flaying; while a third set had the charm inscribed thus:-- "Teufel hilf mir, Leib und Seel' geb' ich Dir!”—“ O Devil, help me! Body and soul I give to thee"--and then doing the paper up into a pill, swallowed it immediately before the encounter. So common was the use of these and similar charms among fighting men, towards the close of the middle ages, that nearly every prisoner taken at the siege of Jemetz, 1588, was found provided with at least one.

Trial by battle being so common, and the parties having such large liberty of fighting by proxy, the champion's was by no means the least lucrative of mediaval professions. Nearly every religious establishment and municipality retained one permanently. The lords paramount, too, fell into the same practice, and added a fighting man to their retinue, with about the same standing and stipend as the chaplain, jester, and astrologer. In the

earlier ages none could contend in the lists who had not a stake in the quarrel. And when it became customary to employ professional swords, it became equally the custom to give those who wielded them an interest beyond that of their mere hire in the event. This was done by attaching penalties to defeat. At first these penalties would seem to have been suggested by the laws of the era of conquest, an era when mutilation was a common offence, and when every mutilation had its own fine. Thus a defeated champion lost a finger, a hand, a limb, an eye, or even life itself, according to the magnitude of the cause entrusted to his skill. This extreme severity fell into disuse with the progress of time, except in capital matters. There, to the last, the champion who failed to vanquish perished with his principal. In the smaller suits, however, he merely lost his fee, or had his license suspended or cancelled. But this punishment did not extend beyond the town or province, and was not always inflicted. In many quarters the champion received his fee whether he won or lost, if the judges decided that he had contended to the best of his ability. But the usages on this point were infinite, and so were those on the amount of the fees. In some places the amount was fixed; in others a matter of contract. In several countries, our own among them, any man might act as champion; but in others the champion had to pass an examination and receive a certificate. The members of the profession did not bear a high character. Most of them were vagrants. An energetic preacher, a war, a pestilence, or a famine, was sure to spoil their trade, and send them in search of new quarters as effectually as defeat. They were great promoters, too, of the quarrels they lived by; they acted as bravoes to gamblers and loose characters; and when other modes of living failed, they took willingly to the highways.

"Duellum fuit, in Berne, inter virum et mulierem; sed mulier prævaluit." "There was a duel at Berne between a woman and a man, but the woman conquered," says an old chronicle under date 1288. This kind of duel was common enough among the Teutonic races. Nor could it have been very unsuitable, that is, accepting the Empress Elizabeth and the Dutchess Cymburga as fair specimens of the German woman in those ages-the ladies we have named being beauties, either of whom could crush a horseshoe out of all shape between her fingers. Breaches of promise and similar disputes were decided by duel in medieval Germany, a faithless swain or errant husband having to meet his indignant victim hand to hand in the lists. In the approved form of this duel the dame was reduced to her chemise. One of its sleeves was lengthened for the occasion by about eighteen inches: and tied up in the end of this long sleeve was a neat pavingstone. The man was also stripped to his last garment, had his left arm tied close to his side, was furnished with a short baton, half an ell in length, and was clapped in a tub planted waist-deep in the ground. The lady manoeuvred round the tub and struck at her antagonist with her sleeve, while he defended himself as best he could with his baton. He had, however, but a poor. chance of triumph in such a contest against a thoroughbred termagant. She might, indeed, miscalculate her stroke and twine her sleeve round the baton. But even then she had by no means the worst of the contest, and was much more likely to disarm him than he was to pull her into the receptacle. Still the latter catastrophe must have occurred at times, or the manuscripts that deal with this species of duel, chiefly by lively drawings, would not have repesented the female champion in one of these encounters, with her heels high in the air, and her head out of sight in the tub.

ON the night of the 11th of May, I went by the steamer from Calais to Dover. There was a heavy sea and a high wind; but at daybreak I reached the shores of

England, which I had not visited for ten years. On that occasion, as I was leaving: the English coast at Ramsgate, the last to wave me farewell was Charles Dickens ;

and to him my visit was now to to be paid. He had invited me to spend a portion of the summer with him and his friends.

"We shall not be staying in London itself," he wrote; "we move out, in the beginning of June, to a little country-house of mine, seven-and-twenty miles from London; it lies in one of the prettiest districts of Kent, near a railway-station; and thence in an hour and a half we can be in London."

This happiness then awaited me: to be able to call Dickens's house my home, to strike root there for a time, and belong to him and his circle. Since my last visit to England we had kept up a correspondence he was now for me a sympathetic friend. I was extremely happy.

The steamer had to wait for the turn of tide-this caused some delay; the customhouse, too, took up a certain time; and we nearly missed the first morning train to London. Post-haste we went through tunnel after tunnel, and soon we saw the great Crystal Palace glittering in full sunshine, and London, swathed in smoke, looming on the horizon. At London Bridge, on the other side of the terminus, the first bell was already ringing for a train on the North Kent Line, that, runs by Higham Station, near Dickens's countryhouse. In hot-haste I got a seat; and we flew away past towns and villages, ever close to the Thames, that streamed on our left, filled with sails and steamers.

Dickens had offered to meet me in London, or at any of the stations I pleased; but I had answered that I should easily find my way to him from Higham, if I only got a porter there to direct me. One can always hire a fly, I thought, in the smallest town. But Higham turned out to be a village, and more than an English mile from the station, which is only one solitary house: and when I alighted, and the train rattled off to Rochester, there I stood quite lost and forlorn.

"Are you the foreign gentleman who is going to Mr. Dickens's?" asked the porter, who knew that I was expected. There was no such thing as a fly to be had at Higham; so the man proposed that I should either wait here till he fetched me some conveyance from Dickens's house, or else follow him there on foot. The station, he said, was two English miles from Gadshill, where Mr. Dickens lived. I decided on

walking. The porter hoisted my box on his back, and slung my carpet and hatbox over his shoulders, and off we trudged, up hill the whole way, between hedges of wild-rose and honeysuckle in full bloom. Every cottage, however small, looked as if it were fitted up as a country-box for some well-to-do townsman-much the same as those on our Strand-way," near Copenhagen; but here in England it is the peasant who has made his abode so neat and clean and comfortable. A bit of carpet might be seen through the open door; flowers stood on the table or in the window; every countryman I met seemed to be in his Sunday best.

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After a rather fatiguing walk, we reached the high-road between Rochester and Gravesend. Before us lay Gadshill Place, Dickens's country-house.

The fame of Gadshill, everybody knows, is due to Shakespeare. In the First Part of "Henry IV.," Poins says:

"To-morrow morning, by four o'clock, early at Gadshill: There are pilgrims going to Canterbury with rich offerings, and traders riding to London with fat purses; I have visors for you all, you have horses for yourselves."

Dover and London, about half-way. Gadshill lies on the high-road between Here, where pilgrim and traveller formerly went in dread of robbers, there is now a peaceful country home, with an atmosphere of wild roses, blooming elder-trees, and broad clover-fields - very different from what Shakespeare saw when he made Falstaff speak of the perilous spot:

"A hundred upon poor four of us. But I followed me close, came in foot and hand; and, with a thought, seven of the eleven I paid. Three misbegotten knaves, in Kendal green, came at my back, and let drive at me ;-for it was so dark, Hal, that thou could'st not see thy hand."

I stood by Gadshill Place, and before me, near the broad high-road, lay Dickens's country-house, its gold-glittering vane had for some way back been visible over the tree-tops.

It was a fine new house, with red walls, four balconied windows, and a portico resting on small pillars. In the attic was an extremely broad window. A thick hedge of cherry-laurel stood close up against the house, which looked over a carefully-tended lawn to the high-road,

and beyond the road to a back-ground of two mighty cedars of Lebanon. These trees spread a broad green roof of branchy boughs over a large grass-plot, the fence of which was so thickly overgrown with ivy and creepers that not a sunbeam could pierce it.

As I was stepping into the house Dickens came out to meet me, with bright looks and a hearty greeting. He looked a little older than when we said good-bye ten years ago; but that was partly owing to the beard he had grown. His eyes were bright as ever; the smile on his lips was the same; his frank voice was just as friendly,-ay, and if possible, more winning still. He was now in the prime of manhood in his 45th year; full of youth and life and eloquence, and rich in a rare humor that glowed with kindliness. I know not how to describe him better than in the words of one of my first letters home: "Take the best out of all Dickens's writings, combine them into the picture of a man, and there thou hast Charles Dickens." And such as in the first hour he stood before me, the very same he remained all the time of my visit; ever genuine, and cheerful, and sympathetic.

It is a great pleasure to find in an author's innermost circle the types of those characters that have delighted one in his works. I had previously heard many people remark that Agnes in "David Copperfield" was like Dickens's own wife; and although he may not have chosen her deliberately as a model for Agnes, yet still I can think of no one else in his books so near akin to her in all that is graceful and amiable. Mrs. Dickens had a certain soft, womanly repose and reserve about her; but whenever she spoke there came such a light into her large eyes, and such a smile upon her lips, and there was such a charm in the tones of her voice, that henceforth I shall always connect her and Agnes together.

The room in which we and some of the children sat down to breakfast was a model of comfort and holiday brightness. The windows were overhung, outside, with a profusion of blooming roses; and one looked out over the garden to green fields, and the hills beyond Rochester. There was a good portrait of Cromwell above the mantel-piece. Among the other paintings there was one that especially caught

At dinner, Dickens took the housefather's place, at the head of the table; and, according to English custom, he always began the meal with a short quiet grace. My own place was next to him during the whole of the visit.

Before I left Denmark, Dickens had written to me: "I have just finished Little Dorrit,' and I am a free man. So we can be play-fellows now, and have some cricket' on the green." But our fellowship was doomed to be brief; for, just the day before I came, Douglas Jerrold, the humorist and dramatist, died; and he had said on his death-bed to his afflicted wife, "Dickens will look after you if I die," and generously and zealously indeed did Dickens exert himself in favor of the poor widow. He undertook the task, and with good success, of collecting a few thousand pounds, the yearly interest of which secures her a moderate income. He got up a committee with names of mark like his ownBulwer, Thackeray, and Macready; and they formed a programme for a whole series of promising undertakings.

It is well known that Dickens had an uncommon talent for acting. He fitted up a little theatre in his house, in Tavistock House, where he and some of his family, together with a few friends, gave dramatic entertainments to a select circle. Two or three of those were now to be played at a high price of admission. Dickens and Thackeray, moreover, proposed to read in public-Dickens having chosen one of his Christmas tales for his own reading. To set all this going, required time and activity. Many a day I saw him sit at home and write off letters by the score; and it was all done with life and gayety, as if it were nothing but sport. sport. I could not help lamenting that our intercourse was so much limited and shortened by his being obliged, oftener than would otherwise have been the case, to run up to London and spend the whole day there.

When I arrived, he and his family had

scarcely been settled a fortnight in this their new country-house; and the neighborhood and the walks were still new to them. I soon found out for myself the finest points, and to one of these, on the highest part of Gadshill, I led Dickens and his family. To make our way up to it we had to cross the broad high-road, where, opposite to the house, stands an inn, bearing a weather-beaten sign-board, painted in memory of the place's Shakespearian importance, with Falstaff and Prince Hal on the one side, and on the other the Merry Wives putting Falstaff into the buck-basket. From the inn ran a hollow lane between quick-set hedges, up to a group of cottages, all two stories high, and their walls covered with vineleaves. Long fresh white curtains hung in the windows. The uppermost cottage was guarded by a blind old watch dog. Cows and sheep grazed on the green; and above them, at the highest point of all, rose a brick obelisk, with cakes of whitewash hanging loose about it. The whole monument gaped with cracks, and threatened to fall at the very next gust of wind. The inscription was not altogether legible; yet so much we could make out, that it was raised in honor of some honest householder hereabouts, possibly long since dead. I made good friends with the monument, and as I was the first to lead Dickens up to it, for the sake of the fine view, he jocosely gave it the name of "Hans Christian Andersen's Monument." This point commanded a view as extensive as it was beautiful. North Kent is justly called the garden of England; it is Danish scenery, but richer and more highly cultivated. One's eye glides over green meadows, yellow cornfields, woods, and moors; and if the weather is fine, one catches sight of the North Sea. There is no lake in the landscape; but the Thames for many miles flows along, and glitters in the green ground. One still finds traces here of old fortifications of the Romans, and here we wandered many an evening. Here we lay on the grass in a circle, and watched the sun go down; its beams turned the windings of the river into gold, where the ships stood out like black shadow-figures, and round about from scattered houses rose the blue chimney smoke. The grasshoppers sang, and a peace spread far and wide, that was only

deepened by the peal of evening bells. A great claret cup, decked with a floating bunch of brown field-flowers, passed from hand to hand; the moon mounted up, round, red, and large, till it shone in clear purity, and made me fancy this might all be a "midsummer night's dream" in Shakespeare's land; and yet it was something more-it was reality. I sat beside Dickens, and shared his fresh and impulsive joy in the beautiful evening; and surely, just as then it was mirrored in his mind, even so will it shine back for us all some day, in a new and immortal work of imagination.

Though I had not had much previous practice in speaking English, or hearing it spoken, yet from the very first I could understand nearly all that Dickens said to me. Whatever puzzled me he repeated in a new form; and nobody caught my meaning quicker than he. Danish and English are so much alike that we were often surprised at the likeness, and so, if a word happened to fail me, Dickens made me repeat it in Danish, and it often sounded to him just like English.

"Der er en Groeshoppe i den hóstak," I wanted to tell him one day, and said it in Danish; his translation came far enough

"grasshopper in the haystack." I saw a mass of green growing on a cottage roof, and asked what they called it here. In my own country the name is "huuslög ;" and the cottager's wife answered, "house-leek ;" and so on without end. We once met a little girl on the road, who made us a low courtesy; and when I remarked that we called this "at stóbe lys" (to dip a candle), Dickens said that the English word dip was used in the same way both for a courtesy and a candle. In France, Italy, and Spain, the Dane feels himself among foreign races; such is not the case in England; here one feels that the blood is of our blood, and the language of the same root as our own. The mouth of the Thames, and Rochester too, knew the daring Danes of old with terror; they came hither, pushed far inland, and did many dreadful deeds. But there was a bond of kinship between the two races, that was strengthened when King Canute reigned over England and the three northern kingdoms, with England for his headquarters, his royal seat. Some traces of this union still linger here. Worsaoe, in his interesting work on Eng