so satisfactory and unusual, that it was Dame
Bunsby's emphatic remark, that she verily
thought they must have flown.

Her mistress received Thomasine with a kind
and hearty welcome, and ratified, by her
everyday approval, her husband's choice of the
Cornish maid. When she was first told that
her name was Bonaventure, and her husband
explained that it signified good-luck, she said,
"Well, sweetheart, when I was a girl they used
to say the name was a foresign of the life,
and God grant that thine may turn out to be."

Time passed on, and in a year or two the wild
Comish lass had grown into a frame of thorough
symmetry, firmness, and health. Her strong
thews, of country origin, rendered her capable
of long and active labour, and she had acquired
with gradual ease the habits and appliances of
city life. She was very soon the favoured and
the favourite manager of the household. Her
mistress, born and reared in a town, had been
long a frail and delicate woman; and life
in London in those days, as now, was fraught
with the manifold perils of pestilent disease.
To one of those ancient scourges of the
population, the sweating sickness, Dame Bunsby
succumbed. Her death drew nigh, and, with
the touching simplicity of the times, she told her
true and tender husband, with smiling tears,
she thought he could not do better than, if
they so agreed, to put Thomasine in her place
when she was gone. "Tell her it was my last
wish."

This gentle desire so uttered, her strong and
grateful feelings towards the master who had
taken her, as she expressed it in her rural
speech, lean from the moor, and fed her, so that
her very bones belonged to him, her happy
home, and the power she would acquire to
make the latter days in the cottage at Wike St.
Marie prosperous and calm, all these impulses
flocked into Thomasine's heart, and controlled
for the time even the remembrance of Cousin
John. That poor young man, when the tidings
came that she was about to become her master's
wedded wife, suddenly disappeared, and for
a while the place of his retreat was unknown;
but it afterwards transpired that he had crossed
the moor to a "house of religious men" called
the White Monks of St. Cleer, and pleaded for
reception there as a needy novice of the gate.
His earnest entreaties had prevailed; and six
months after his first love, and his last, had put
on her silks as a city dame, and began her rule
as the mistress of a goodly house in London,
her cousin had taken the vows of his novitiate,
and received the first tonsure of St. John.

Her married life did not, however, long
endure. Three years after the master became the
husband he "took the plague-sore," and died.
They were childless, but he bequeathed "all his
goods and chattel property, and his well-furnished
mansion, to his dear wife, Thomasine
Bonaventure, now Bunsby;" and the maid of
the moor became one of the wealthy widows of
London city. Among the MSS. which still
survive, there is a letter which announces the
event of her husband's death and bequest, and
then proceeds to notify her solemn donation, as
a year's-mind of Master Bunsby, of ten marks
to the Reeve of Wike St. Marie, "to the intent
that he shall cause skeelful masons to build a
bridge at the Ford of Green-a-Moor; yea, and
with stout stonework well laid; and see!"
she wrote, "that they do no harm to that tree
which standeth fast, by the brook, neither
dispoyle they the rushes and plants that grow
thereby; for there did I passe many goodly
hours when I was a simple mayde, and there
did I first see the kind face of a fathful frend."
But in another missive to her mother, about the
same date, there is a touch of tenderness which
shows that her woman's nature survived all
changes, and was strong within her still. She
writes:  I know that Cousin John is engaged
to the monks of St. Cleer. Hath he been
shorn, as they do call it, for the second time?
Inquire, I beseech, if he seeketh to dispart
from that cell? And will red gold help him
away? I am prospered in pouch and coffer,
and he need not shame to be indebted unto me,
that owe so much to him." But this frank and
kindly effort—"the late remorse of love"—did
not avail. John had broken the last link that
bound him to the world, and was lost to love
and her. Reckless thenceforward therefore, if
not fancy-free, and it may be somewhat schooled
by the habits and associations of city life, she
did not wear the widow's wimple long. After
an interval of years, we find her the honoured
wife "of that worshipful merchant adventurer,
Master John Gall, of St. Lawrence, Milk-street."

Gall was very rich and he appears to have
emptied his money-bags into his wife's lap, as
the gossip of the city ran, for it is on record
that soon after her second marriage she
manifested her prosperity, like a true-hearted
Cornish woman, by ample "gifts" and largesse
to the borough of St. Marie, "my native
place." Twenty acres of woodland copse in
the neighbourhood were bought and
conveyed, by that kind and gracious lady, Dame
Thomasine Gall, to feoffees and trust-men
for the perpetual use of the poor of the
paroche "for fewel to be hewn in parcels once
a year, and justly and equally divided for
evermore on the vigil of St. Thomas the Twin." To
her mother she sends by "a waggon which has
gone on an enterprise into Cornwall, for woollen
merchandise, a chest with array of clothing for
fair weather and foul, head-gear and body
raiment to boot, all the choice and costly gifts to
my loving parents of my goodman Gall, and in
remembrance, as he chargeth me to say, that ye
have reared for him a kindly and loving wife."
But the graphic and touching passage in this
letter is the message which succeeds: "Lo!
I do send you also here withal in the coffer a
litel boke: it is for a gift to my Cousin John.
Tell him it is not written as the whilom usage
was and he was wont to teach me my Christ
Cross Rhime; but it is what they do call
emprinted with a strange device of an iron engin
brought from forrin parts. Bid him not despise