the daughter of the Wexford burgess. My honored parents, is this your will?"

"It is, my boy," they cried with one voice. His mother threw her arms around his neck, and the scene that began in irritation ended in hallowed love, a chivalrous sense of duty sustaining them in the pain and fear and sorrow of parting.

Several of the De la Roche retainers

nad already volunteered for the crusade, and great was their joy to learn that their young master was to be of their company. Some of them enthusiastically opened their jerkins and showed him the crusade brand, a cross stamped on the flesh with a hot iron, which mark large numbers of them had flocked on a certain day to the market cross to receive, as indelible pledge of their vow.

And then he went to say good-bye. Sweet and sad was their last stroll beneath the whispering trees along the Slaney.

"It is won, my love," he said; "their consent is won. I leave you for a time, but I will feel your prayers enwrapping me like a benediction on land and sea. Anon we shall meet again and be happy for evermore."

"And be happy for evermore, my own true knight," she cheeringly concurred. It was a bold thing for one of the contemned class to do, but she untied the scarlet snood or ribbon that bound her glossy brown hair and gave it to him with as much proud and happy confidence as if her father owned coat armor. Gladly he took it as an inspiring and ennobling talisman, his spirit of chivalrous love and loyalty strengthened by his training of the period

"In letters, arms,

Fair mien, discourses, civil exercises, And all the blazon of a gentleman." It was paradise on the banks of the Slaney, with the sunset's red gold on the

boles of the beeches, and the wavelets musically plashing on the shore, and before him the sweetest face in the whole world; and it was a long, long cry to Palestine. But the strong and sacred Call of the Crusade was upon him, and so he bade her a fond adieu and went where honor and duty called him.

Next day she watched from the window of her peaked wooden home the fighting men and palmers trooping down to the quay, where the transports lay, floating the red cross flag. Among

the banners she noticed that of De la Roche, with its three fishes. And she saw sail after sail vanishing out of the haven, wafting away men and munitions to aid King Richard of the Lion Heart in his strenuous struggle against the gallant Sultan Saladin.

Months lengthened into years, and years into a decade and more, and scanty and unreliable was the news that trickled back concerning the heir of Ardtramont and Roche's Country and his little band of retainers. Of those who traveled from the fiord of the Slaney to the port of Acre few returned to thrill the folks with the tale of their experiences in the Holy Land. Death ate up some and others slavery.

But the faithful love of woman lived through it all; and at each report of an incoming vessel from the Holy Land there was a white-haired lady of noble birth and a flower-faced maiden of humble origin who repaired to the quay of Wexford and eagerly questioned each new arrival, be he gaunt and bronzed knight, esquire or man-at-arms, or holy monk, or rakish troubadour, or pious. palmer with staff, wallet and scallop

shell.

Long and weary was the quest and suspense, and when at length the long sought tidings came they were those of sadness, sorrow and heartbreak. They were brought by a war-shattered Knight of St. John who would never more be able to wield falchion or lay lance in rest.

Christians in fierce conflict on the red sands of Palestine, sands specially and horribly red on that day of disaster.

Both master and esquire were made prisoners. Their wounds were tended to, their hunger and thirst appeased, and then under escort they were sent south to join the army of Christian slaves. Chained and half naked they had to toil hard daily under the lash, their flesh becoming brown and shriveled in the hot sun, their ribs starkly showing, their eyes cavernous. They saw their comrades droop and perish around them, and they envied them as they saw their corpses buried in the sand, scarce so deep as to baffle the prowling jackal. It was a terrible ordeal.

"We started out with the red cross on our breasts; now we have many redder ones on our backs," groaned Jenkin as he staggered into their prison room. after one of many scourgings.

"Courage, my brave boy, they are but so many marks of honor and loyalty," said Alexander, whose natural cheerfulness defied the rigors of adversity. "Welcome the ax as well as the whip ere we sell our souls by donning the turban of the false prophet. Trust me, we shall yet live to see again the pleasant banks of the Slaney."

For ever there came to him, as in a desert mirage, the green woods of Ardtramont, the shining water, and the sweetest face in the world.

So dragged by weary years and years, and at length came a truce, bringing amid the slaves a party of Christian visitors and inquirers. These were friars, Crutched friars or Cross-bearers, of the noble, self-sacrificing Order of the Redemption of Captives, men whose special mission was the release of Christian slaves, even though, if unable to pay the ransom, they had, according to their solemn vow, to put themselves in their places and take on their chains.

In the case of De la Roche and Jenkin Cordyce the ransoms were happily

forthcoming.

Glad was the day when. they rejoined their old companions in arms, even though it was to learn that King Richard of the Lion Heart was a prisoner in Austria and in sore need of ransom himself.

Freedom and good nourishment soon built up their worn physiques. Eager were their inquiries for home news, but, although they saw many Anglo-Irish knights and Irish galloglasses not a few, not a soul could they find from their angle of the green isle. After some months they started for home. Joyous was the sail down the blue Mediterranean, and at a French port they were fortunate enough to find a ship bound for Wexford harbor.

When he stepped ashore at Wexford quay Sir Alexander de la Roche felt inclined to kneel down and kiss the earth; it seemed as holy to him as the Holy Land. His locks were gray and his face was gaunt, but his eyes were bright and eagle-like and his form was stately and soldierly. The marks of fetters were on his limbs but at his heels glinted and clinked the golden spurs of knighthood nobly won. And his heart was glowing and beating with all the newly restored joy of life.

"Jenkin, my soldier," he said, "I told you we would see again the grand old banks of the Slaney, and here we are at home."

And then he hurriedly proceeded to make inquiries as to those nearest and dearest to him.

"Know you Sir Adam de la Roche?" he inquired of the first man they met.

The man halted and stared. "Sir Adam of Ardtramont? Why, yes, I knew him, as we all knew him around here, but he has been dead these six years. His son Alexander was killed in the holy wars."

"And Sir Adam's wife, the Lady Gwendoline?"

"It is only a few months since she followed her husband to the tomb."

WHETHER or not we accept the

statement of Yeats, the Irish poet, that true poetry must not be didactic, and that hard and fast philosophy and poetry are extensively contradictory, we at least picture the scientist as a man of cold, hard fact in whose life-work the suppression of imagination and the elaboration of detail and circumstance are essential to success. Yet life itself seems a veritable Puck in its prankish habit of upsetting our pet conclusions; it furnishes time and again its exceptions to prove our rules. Even a scientist may have emotions, sentiment and imagery, and it is perplexing, but nevertheless a fact, that one element in the success of Sir Humphry Davy, the greatest English chemist of his age, was his vivid imag ination and that undoubted poetic talent which made him the friend and correspondent of Coleridge and Scott.

The little town of Penzance in Cornwall has done nothing more notable than to be the birthplace of Humphry Davy. Edmund Davy, his father, was the village wood carver; a thriftless sort of person who carved wood ornaments and farmed and mined, all indifferently well. The end of his not unhappy, aimless life came when he was forty-eight. The good which he failed to do lived after him in the shape of debts, and mortgages on his little property which had to be sacrificed to meet the requirements of creditors. Mrs. Davy was made of sterner stuff than her husband; she opened a millinery store and suc

ceeded in the course of time in paying off all of her husband's obligations.

Davy was sixteen when his father died an undergrown, curly-haired lad, who had learned little at the village school except a love of mischief and a facility for translating Latin into English verse which made him the official valentine writer for all the lovesick youths of Penzance. Truly environment seems to have had little influence in moulding Davy's life work. He had few books, and the coast of Cornwall was a wild and primitive country in which the roads were mostly bridle paths, and newspapers were practically unknown. Carriages were wonderful curiosities, and only one house in Penzance boasted of the luxury of a carpet. No enlightenment could be expected to come out of such a country, we would say yet the improbable happened.

A year before his father's death Davy left school and began a desultory life of fishing, hunting and occasional dissipation which augured no great things for his future. But his father's death changed all that. His great and admirable love for his mother, a desire to be of help to her, was the mainspring of his ambition. And so a few weeks after his father's death he was apprenticed to Mr. Bingham Borlase, an apothecary and surgeon practicing in Penzance. It was not enough for him that he should do only what his preceptor required of him; he at once marked out for himself a course of study and selfimprovement which is probably unparal