of the community, testified neither anxiety nor haste on the occasion.—­Christmas-eve arrived, and the canon was still in his cell:  Christmas-night came, and still he did not stir.  At length, when the mass was actually begun, his brethren, more uneasy than himself, reproached him with his delay; upon which he muttered his spell, called up a spirit, mounted him, reached Rome in the twinkling of an eye, performed his task, and, the service being ended, he stormed the archives of the Vatican, where he burned the compulsory act, and then returned by the same conveyance to Bayeux, which he reached before the mass was completed, and, to the unspeakable joy of the chapter, announced the happy tidings of their deliverance.

So idle and unmeaning is the tale, that I should scarcely have thought it worth while to have repeated it, but for the Latin distich, which, as the story goes, was extemporized by the demon, at the moment when they were flying over the Tuscan sea, and by which he sought to mislead his rider, and to cause him to end his journey beneath the deep.—­The sense of the verses is not very perspicuous, but they are remarkable for reading forwards and backwards the same; and though to you they may appear a childish waste of intellect, you will, I am sure, admit them to be ingenious, and they may amuse some of the younger members of your family:—­

   “Signa te, signa, temere me tangis et angis;
    Roma tibi subito motibus ibit amor.”—­

I must dismiss the canon of Cambremer, by stating, that I am informed by a friend, that the same story is also found in the lives of sundry other wizards and sorcerers of the good old times.

Bayeux cathedral, like the other Neustrian churches, has been deprived of its sainted relics, and its most precious treasures, in consequence of the successive spoliations which have been inflicted upon it by heathen Normans, heretical Calvinists, and philosophical jacobins.  The body of St. Exuperius was carried, in the ninth century, for safety to Corbeil, and the chapter have never been able to recover it:  that of St. Regnobert was in after times stolen by the Huguenots.  Many are the attempts that have been made to regain the relics of the first bishop of the see; but the town of Corbeil retained possession, whilst the Bajocessians attempted to console themselves by antithetical piety.—­“Referamus Deo gratias, nec inde aliquid nos minus habere credamus, quod Corbeliensis civitas pignus sacri corporis vindicavit.  Teneant illi tabernaculum beatae animae in cineribus suis; nos ipsam teneamus animam in virtutibus suis:  teneant illi ossa, nos merita:  apud illos videatur remansisse quod terrae est, nos studeamus habere quod coeli est:  amplectantur illi quod sepulchre, nos quod Paradiso continetur.  Meminerit et beatior ille vir, utrique quidem loco, sed huic speciali se jure deberi.”—­St. Regnobert’s chasuble is however, left to the church, together with his maniple and his stole, all of them articles