m
the neighboring Pelican Inn. A great feast is evidently toward, for
with those white-aproned waiters are gay serving men, wearing on their
shoulders the city-badge. The lord mayor is giving a dinner to certain
gentlemen of the Leicester house party, who are interested in foreign
discoveries; and what place so fit for such a feast as the Pelican
itself?

Look at the men all round; a nobler company you will seldom see.
Especially too, if you be Americans, look at their faces, and reverence
them; for to them and to their wisdom you owe the existence of your
mighty fatherland.

At the head of the table sits the lord mayor; whom all readers will
recognize at once, for he is none other than that famous Sir Edward
Osborne, clothworker, and ancestor of the dukes of Leeds, whose romance
now-a-days is in every one's hands. He is aged, but not changed, since
he leaped from the window upon London Bridge into the roaring tide
below, to rescue the infant who is now his wife. The chivalry and
promptitude of the 'prentice boy have grown and hardened into the
thoughtful daring of the wealthy merchant adventurer. There he sits, a
right kingly man, with my lord Earl of Cumberland on his right hand, and
Walter Raleigh on his left; the three talk together in a low voice on
the chance of there being vast and rich countries still undiscovered
between Florida and the River of Canada. Raleigh's half-scientific
declamation and his often quotations of Doctor Dee the conjuror, have
less effect on Osborne than on Cumberland (who tried many an adventure
to foreign parts, and failed in all of them; apparently for the simple
reason that, instead of going himself, he sent other people), and
Raleigh is fain to call to his help the quiet student who sits on his
left hand, Richard Hakluyt, of Oxford. But he is deep in talk with a
reverend elder, whose long white beard flows almost to his waist, and
whose face is furrowed by a thousand storms; Anthony Jenkinson by name,
the great Asiatic traveller, who is discoursing to the Christ-church
virtuoso of reindeer sledges and Siberian steppes, and of the fossil
ivory, plain proof of Noah's flood, which the Tungoos dig from the
ice-cliffs of the Arctic sea. Next to him is Christopher Carlile,
Walsingham's son-in-law (as Sidney also is now), a valiant captain,
afterwards general of the soldiery in Drake's triumphant West Indian
raid of 1585, with whom a certain Bishop of Carthagena will hereafter
drink good w