to her; but the abbess would suffer no person to enter her house, nor would she deliver up this unhappy man to the care of the jealous wife, determining herself to use gentle means for his recovery, and she retired into her house again, and ordered her gates to be shut against them. During the course of this eventful day, in which so many errors had happened from the likeness the twin brothers bore to each other, old Ægeon's day of grace was passing away, it being now near sunset: and at sunset he was doomed to die, if he could not pay the money. The place of his execution was near this convent, and here he arrived just as the abbess retired into the convent; the duke attending in person, that if any offered to pay the money, he might be present to pardon him. Adriana stopped this melancholy procession, and cried out to the duke for justice, telling him that the abbess had refused to deliver up her lunatic husband to her care. While she was speaking, her real husband and his servant Dromio, who had got loose, came before the duke to demand justice, complaining that his wife had confined him on a false charge of lunacy; and telling in what manner he had broken his bands, and eluded the vigilance of his keepers, Adriana was strangely surprised to see her husband, when she thought he had been within the convent. Ægeon seeing his son, concluded this was the son who had left him to go in search of his mother and his brother; and he felt secure that this dear son would readily pay the money demanded for his ransom. He therefore spoke to Antipholis in words of fatherly affection, with joyful hope that he should now be released. But to the utter astonishment of Egeon, his son denied all knowledge of him, as well he might, for this. Antipholis had never seen his father since they were separated in the storm in his infancy; but while the poor old Egeon was in vain endeavouring to make his son acknowledge him, thinking surely that either his griefs and the anxieties he had suffered had so strangely altered him that his son did not know him, or else that he was ashamed to acknowledge his father in his misery; in the midst of this perplexity, the lady abbess and the other Antipholis and Dromio came out, and the wondering Adriana saw two husbands. and two Dromios standing before her. And now these riddling errors, which had so perplexed them all, were clearly made out. When the duke saw the two Antipholises and the two Dromios both so exactly alike, he at once conjectured aright of these seeming mysteries, for he remembered the story Ægeon had told him in the morning; and he said, these men must be the two sons of Egeon and their twin slaves. But now an unlooked-for joy indeed completed the bistory of Ægeon; and the tale he had in the morning told in sorrow, and under sentence of death, before the setting sun went down was brought to a happy conclusion, for the venerable lady abbess made herself known to be the long-lost wife of Ægeon, and the fond mother of the two Antipholises. When the fishermen took the eldest Antipholis and Dromio away from her, she entered a nunnery, and by her wise and virtuous conduct she was at length made lady abbess of this convent, and in discharging the rites of hospitality to an unhappy stranger she had unknowingly protected her own son. Joyful congratulations and affectionate greetings between these long separated parents, and their children, made them for a while forget that Ægeon was yet under sentence of death: but. when they were become a little calm, Antipholis of Ephesus offered the duke the ransom-money for his father's life; but the duke freely pardoned Ægeon, and would not take the money. And the duke went with the abbess and her newlyfound husband and children into the convent, to hear this happy family discourse at leisure of the blessed ending of their adverse fortunes. And the two Dromios' humble joy must not be forgotten; they had their congratulations and greetings too, and each Dromio pleasantly complimented his brother on his good looks, being well pleased to see his own person (as in a glass) shew so handsome in his brother. Adriana had so well profited by the good counsel of her mother-in-law, that she never after cherished unjust suspicions, or was jealous of her husband. Antipholis of Syracuse married the fair Luciana, the sister of his brother's wife; and the good old Egeon, with at Ephesus many years. of these perplexities so his wife and sons, lived Nor did the unravelling entirely remove every |