'The great Martin Luther,' he continued, 'reports such another
story of a certain Almaigne, who, when thieves were in the act of
murdering him, espying a flight of crows, cried aloud, "Oh crows, I take
you for witnesses and revengers of my death." And so it fell out, some
days afterwards, as these same thieves were drinking in an inn, a flight
of crows came and lighted on the top of the house; whereupon the
thieves, jesting, said to one another, "See, yonder are those who are to
avenge the death of him we despatched t'other day," which the tapster
overhearing, told forthwith to the magistrate, who arrested them
presently, and thereupon they confessed, and were put to death.' And so
he went on, sustaining his position with strange narratives culled here
and there from the wilderness of his reading.
Among the congregation that heard this sermon, at the eccentricities of
which I have hinted, but which had, beside, much that was striking,
simply pathetic, and even awful in it, there glided--shall I say--a
phantom, with the light of death, and the shadows of hell, and the
taint of the grave upon him, and sat among these respectable persons of
flesh and blood--impenetrable--secure--for he knew there were but two in
the church for whom clever disguises were idle and transparent as the
air.
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