elucidates the ancient truths which we living offshoots of those strenuous times are too apt to confuse. Mr. Henry Newbolt has kindly read the incompleted chapters, and added two quotations from Monstrelet which explain the course of events. He sought for the books in the London Library and found in the volume of Monstrelet belonging there, certain pencil marks which showed that the actual course of this story was pointed out for quotation. Can my Father himself have made them? It is an interesting problem that he possessed certain volumes of Monstrelet I have already stated, but he may have consulted others.

A. I. R.

Ar the battle of Najara, among the scaly men of mark that fell into the hands of the English along with the redoubtable Du Guesclin was a Flemish knight by name Franck de Borsellen, who was making almost his first campaign.

The men of mark were ransomed by their captors at exorbitant prices, except Du Guesclin, their chief, who considered that he was paid a very high compliment by the Black Prince Edward because the latter refused to yield him up at any fine whatever.

Although among the chivalry of those days it was often the fashion to allow the captured warrior to fix the price of his own release, young Borsellen would never have thought of valuing his own bravery at the price of ten thousand crowns-which nevertheless was set on it-and would very probably have escaped at a much humbler rate had he not unluckily found some friends in the English camp who knew, or thought they knew, perfectly the value of his estates, and estimated the cost of his freedom accordingly. The fact is that very many of the English knights now fighting under the banner of their liege lord, the Prince of Acquitaine, and aiding Peter the Cruel his ally, had been a few months before in the service of Peter's adversary Henry, to whom Bertrand du Guesclin had brought a great host of warriors of all nations anxious to fight under so renowned a leader.

When the Black Prince took up the quarrel of Peter and invaded Henry's kingdom, he recalled the English and other soldiers who owed him obedience from the latter's service; and it was one of these Englishmen, to whom Franck de Borsellen had often (as is the fashion of young cavaliers) boasted of the wealth and splendour of his lordship of Borsellen, that now took his old companion of arms prisoner and fixed the above-named price for his ransom.

Franck had nothing for it but to yield, and when the Black Prince returned to Bordeaux was compelled to send from thence letters to his mother and the intendant of his little domains in Hainault, who, after melting all his plate, selling all his precious jewels, his armours, his horses and hawks, nay, his fields and villages, brought at length the ten thousand crowns to Franck's captors, and

left him quite free, but as near a beggar as any nobleman might be who had a horse and sword, two or three stout fellows at his back, and a stomach that regularly twice a day called out for its portion of beef and strong drink.

There is no doubt but that in our days a gentleman of six feet high, who could not write and read, and who possessed for all his fortune the above-named appetite and encumbrances, would be a beggar, or at the very most a private in the Life Guards. In the year 1370, however, men of noble birth were not ruined so easily; and three-and-twenty years after the fight of Najara, which cost him everything except a few acres round the bare old walls of his castle of Borsellen, Franck was back in the halls of his fathers again, with plenty of wood blazing in the old chimney, a reasonable store of silver flagons on the table, wine-butts in the cellars, cooks to dress the beef, brave soldiers to eat it, dogs to gnaw the bones, horses in the stables, hawks on the perch, and moreover (but she sate all day spinning with her maidens in a turret upstairs) a lady of Borsellen, who had brought the Baron a sufficient dower, and afterwards a daughter and two fair sons; the daughter (whom out of politeness we have named first, though she was the second born of the family) was called Isabeau; the eldest son was christened Jehan or John, after John of Gaunt, whom the Baron had served; and finally the younger son was called Franck after himself.

Borsellen was not in the bloom of youth when he married his lady. After losing the chief part of his patrimony in the manner above described, he had taken service with John of Lancaster, or, as he was pleased to call himself, the Lord of Spain; and, after battling through the hundred conspiracies in which that turbulent Prince was engaged, had been rewarded by his master with the hand of pretty Alice Poyns, the daughter of one of the Duke's intendants who had amassed a fortune in his service. Some young squire of her own country had, it was said, already won the heart of the poor girl, but Franck was not of a disposition to consider this prior attachment as an obstacle, and set on some of his free companions to waylay and well-nigh kill the squire, and carried off the young lady and her dowry, and carried them together to his castle of Borsellen, to make bombance and good cheer for the rest of his days. For he did not care for fighting as long as he could live in peaceful plenty, hunting of mornings and getting drunk of evenings as a bold baron should.

The young Baron John de Borsellen was in every way worthy

of his amiable father. At eight years old he was not afraid of the biggest dog or man in the household, and would lash one or the other with his whip or his belt as he had seen his father do. At six he had beaten his nurse first and then his mother, and his father laughed when he heard the story, and swore by St. Ives that the young rogue had served them right. He had from that time. quitted the women's apartments, the tender mother, the silly nurse, and the prosy old chaplain, and had taken his place in the hall in a little chair by his father's great one, and had had a little cup that was filled out of the Baron's big silver flagon, and used to sing :

Duc de Bourgogne,

Que Dieu vous tienne en foie.

with a lusty little voice; nay, had ridden many and many a long hunt behind Franck de Borsellen on his great trotting Flemish stallion when it pleased the Baron, as it did almost every morning, to ride out and hunt the buck or the boar. When he was nine years old he had a little pack of dogs of his own, and a pack of little varlets still more obedient than the dogs, and he used to go out on foot and hunt hares and rabbits in the commons and copses, badgers in the morasses and along the rivers, on his own account. Woe betide the young serf who thwarted Messire Jehan in any way! He had one day tied up one on to a tree and was taking very good aim at him with a crossbow, and would have killed him too, had not his father chanced to ride by, who in a fit of compassion released the lad. However, the Baron vowed that it was the best joke he ever knew, and told his friends a hundred times over what a spirited mad wag his son and heir was.

Isabeau, the second-born, came into the world six years after the young Baron, and it is never known that, from the day of her birth to that of his death, her father took the slightest notice of her. He had no fortune to give her, and proposed at a proper age, unless some neighbouring nobleman took a fancy to make her his wife, to place her in a convent and dedicate her to Heaven. Many a comely and tender young damsel was in those days doomed to bury her youthful charms in the cloister and accommodate herself as best she might to that lonely and unnatural servitude.

At last came Franck, a sickly puling child for the first years of his life, who was frightened like Astyanax at his father's nodding plumes and frowning crest the only time when the Baron, about to ride out on a war-party, deigned to embrace him, and who