remained for young Essex to
begin the degradation of the order in his hapless Irish campaign, and
for James to complete that degradation by his novel method of raising
money by the sale of baronetcies; a new order of hereditary knighthood
which was the laughing-stock of the day, and which (however venerable
it may have since become) reflects anything but honor upon its first
possessors.

"I owe you no thanks, Colin," said Frank, "for having broached my
secret: but I have lost nothing after all. There is still an order of
knighthood in which I may win my spurs, even though her majesty refuse
me the accolade."

"What, then? you will not take it from a foreign prince?"

Frank smiled.

"Have you never read of that knighthood which is eternal in the heavens,
and of those true cavaliers whom John saw in Patmos, riding on white
horses, clothed in fine linen, white and clean, knights-errant in the
everlasting war against the False Prophet and the Beast? Let me but
become worthy of their ranks hereafter, what matter whether I be called
Sir Frank on earth?"

"My son," said Mrs. Leigh, "remember that they follow One whose vesture
is dipped, not in the blood of His enemies, but in His own."

"I have remembered it for many a day; and remembered, too, that the
garments of the knights may need the same tokens as their captain's."

"Oh, Frank! Frank! is not His precious blood enough to cleanse all sin,
without the sacrifice of our own?"

"We may need no more than His blood, mother, and yet He may need ours,"
said Frank.

* * * * *

How that conversation ended I know not, nor whether Spenser fulfilled
his purpose of introducing the two brothers and their mother into his
"Faerie Queene." If so, the manuscripts must have been lost among those
which perished (along with Spenser's baby) in the sack of Kilcolman by
the Irish in 1598. But we need hardly regret the loss of them; for the
temper of the Leighs and their mother is the same which inspires every
canto of that noblest of poems; and which inspired, too, hundreds in
those noble days, when the chivalry of the Middle Ages was wedded to the
free thought and enterprise of the new.

* * * * *

So mother and sons returned to Bideford, and set to work. Frank
mortgaged a farm; Will Cary did the same (having some land of his own
from his mother). Old Salterne grumbled at any man save himself spending
a penny on the voyage, and forced on the a