women will. At Easter we decorated it with spring flowers, with dewy
primroses and fragrant violets, and with the yellow bells of the wild
daffodil, to the huge delight of the poor who crowded in, and of the
little London children who had, many of them, never seen a flower.
Here I met the Rev. Frank Besant, a young Cambridge man, who had just
taken orders, and was serving the little mission church as deacon;
strange that at the same time I should meet the man I was to marry,
and the doubts which were to break the marriage tie. For in the Holy
Week preceding that Easter Eve, I had been--as English and Roman
Catholics are wont to do--trying to throw the mind back to the time
when the commemorated events occurred, and to follow, step by step,
the last days of the Son of Man, living, as it were, through those
last hours, so that I might be ready to kneel before the cross on Good
Friday, to stand beside the sepulchre on Easter Day. In order to
facilitate the realisation of those last sacred days of God incarnate
on earth, working out man's salvation, I resolved to write a brief
history of that week, compiled from the Four Gospels, meaning them to
try and realise each day the occurrences that had happened on the
corresponding date in A.D. 33, and so to follow those "blessed feet"
step by step, till they were

"... nailed for our advantage to the bitter cross."

With the fearlessness which springs from ignorance I sat down to my
task. My method was as follows:--

MATTHEW. | MARK. | LUKE. | JOHN.
| | |
PALM SUNDAY. | PALM SUNDAY. | PALM SUNDAY. | PALM SUNDAY.
| | |