wearied of profitless crime, reverted to hon esty, and prospered according to the meas ure of his intelligence. How the respectable Stevens concealed his treasure I do not know. When his un paid money-lender and his numberless other clamoring creditors swept up the relics of his property, they found no gold and no
case with the Bank of England's broken seal. The man was bankrupt and broken in spirit. He was discharged from the South Eastern Bank, and may occasionly be seen, on his lucky days, carrying sand wich boards in the Strand. BENNET COPPLELSTONE. Cortihill Magazine.
THERE is perhaps nothing CURIOSITIES very attrac OF RENT.
tive to the general reader in the men tion of " Rent; " but when we come to con sider the quaint forms which it has often adopted, the subject will not be found wholly devoid of romantic interest. In days gone by, when kings had perforce to maintain a large crowd of retainers, and nobles vied with each other in the numbers of their retinue, it was not always easy to find the where withal with which to carry on the provisioning of such large households; and so landlords, royal and otherwise, were often glad to ac cept useful commodities, such as the herrings of Yarmouth or thirteen hundred eggs with one hundred and forty hens from Banbury, in place of the usual military service due to them for different estates. In other instances the tenants bound themselves to perform cer tain necessary offices for their over-lord's household, as in the case of Emma de Hau ton, whose duty it was to cut out linen cloths for the king and queen, or Robert Testard, who had to maintain a certain number of royal laundresses. A third class of tenures consisted of those which were practically nominal obligations, such as the presentation of a "quhyt feather" for the lands of Balgonie, or a July clover flower for an estate in Hereford, or again the three pepper-corns which were paid in 1 348 for Bermeton. Nor was this practice confined to England. A dying queen of Hungary bequeathed a city
and province to one of her court lords on condition that he and his successors should always keep up a certain number of peacocks; and the chroniclers of the Spanish Conquest of Mexico tell us that the great Aztec nobles were often obliged to provide for the repair of the royal palaces, and to pay an annual offering of fruit or flowers in lieu of the mili tary service due for their estates. The earliest mention of blanch-holdings (so-called apparently from the fact that they were often paid in silver or white money) which I have been able to discover is in a charter by Canute, who granted the lands of Pusey, Berkshire, on condition that a certain horn was always treasured in the family, and this valuable heirloom bore the following in scription : Kyng Knowde geve Wyllyam Perose Thys home to holde by thy lande.
These tenures appear to have been fre quently granted from the time of the Nor man Conquest to the fifteenth century, but we find an occasional instance occurring from that date almost to the present time. Visit ors to the beautiful chapel of St. George at Windsor will have seen the two small silken banners which are fastened together on one of the pillars, and represent the rent paid to the crown by the Dukes of Marlborough and Wellington for the splendid estates of Wood stock and Strathfieldsaye respectively. They are supposed to be presented on the anniver-
