himself, he offered his services to
the Emperor Rudolph to fight the Turks, and it is said led an army of
his French followers, numbering 15,000, in 1601, to Hungary, to raise
the siege of Coniza, which was beleaguered by Ibrahim Pasha with 60,000
men.

Chance of fighting and pay failing in France by reason of the peace,
he enrolled himself under the banner of one of the roving and fighting
captains of the time, who sold their swords in the best market, and
went over into the Low Countries, where he hacked and hewed away at his
fellow-men, all in the way of business, for three or four years. At
the end of that time he bethought himself that he had not delivered his
letters to Scotland. He embarked at Aucusan for Leith, and seems to
have been shipwrecked, and detained by illness in the "holy isle" in
Northumberland, near Barwick. On his recovery he delivered his letters,
and received kind treatment from the Scots; but as he had no money,
which was needed to make his way as a courtier, he returned to
Willoughby.

The family of Smith is so "ancient" that the historians of the county
of Lincoln do not allude to it, and only devote a brief paragraph to the
great John himself. Willoughby must have been a dull place to him after
his adventures, but he says he was glutted with company, and retired
into a woody pasture, surrounded by forests, a good ways from any town,
and there built himself a pavilion of boughs--less substantial than the
cabin of Thoreau at Walden Pond--and there he heroically slept in his
clothes, studied Machiavelli's "Art of War," read "Marcus Aurelius," and
exercised on his horse with lance and ring. This solitary conduct got
him the name of a hermit, whose food was thought to be more of
venison than anything else, but in fact his men kept him supplied with
provisions. When John had indulged in this ostentatious seclusion for a
time, he allowed himself to be drawn out of it by the charming discourse
of a noble Italian named Theodore Palaloga, who just then was Rider to
Henry, Earl of Lincoln, and went to stay with him at Tattershall. This
was an ancient town, with a castle, which belonged to the Earls of
Lincoln, and was situated on the River Bane, only fourteen miles from
Boston, a name that at once establishes a connection between Smith's
native county and our own country, for it is nearly as certain that St.
Botolph founded a monastery at Boston, Lincoln, in the year 654, as it
is that he founded a c