a fair young Miss Foljambe, of Derbyshire, then about Queen Elizabeth's
Court, who was as tired as he of the sins of the world, though she had
seen less of them; and the two contrived to please each other so well,
that though the queen grumbled a little, as usual, at the lady for
marrying, and at the gentleman for adoring any one but her royal self,
they got leave to vanish from the little Babylon at Whitehall, and
settle in peace at Burrough. In her he found a treasure, and he knew
what he had found.

Mrs. Leigh was, and had been from her youth, one of those noble old
English churchwomen, without superstition, and without severity, who
are among the fairest features of that heroic time. There was a certain
melancholy about her, nevertheless; for the recollections of her
childhood carried her back to times when it was an awful thing to be a
Protestant. She could remember among them, five-and-twenty years ago,
the burning of poor blind Joan Waste at Derby, and of Mistress Joyce
Lewis, too, like herself, a lady born; and sometimes even now, in her
nightly dreams, rang in her ears her mother's bitter cries to God,
either to spare her that fiery torment, or to give her strength to bear
it, as she whom she loved had borne it before her. For her mother, who
was of a good family in Yorkshire, had been one of Queen Catherine's
bedchamber women, and the bosom friend and disciple of Anne Askew. And
she had sat in Smithfield, with blood curdled by horror, to see the
hapless Court beauty, a month before the paragon of Henry's Court,
carried in a chair (so crippled was she by the rack) to her fiery doom
at the stake, beside her fellow-courtier, Mr. Lascelles, while the very
heavens seemed to the shuddering mob around to speak their wrath and
grief in solemn thunder peals, and heavy drops which hissed upon the
crackling pile.