saddle, before the
horse had recovered from his astonishment.

Once in, no effort of the untamed beast could succeed in ousting him
from his seat. In vain it reared and plunged; in vain it pulled and
careered round the yard; he stuck to his seat as if he grew there, and
with cool eye and quiet smile seemed even to enjoy his position. After
many unavailing efforts the horse seemed to yield his vicious will to
the stronger will of his rider, and then the boy, lashing him into a
gallop, fairly put him through his paces before all the spectators, and
finally walked him quietly up to the window at which the ungainly man,
trembling, and with tears in his eyes, had all the while watched his
exploit. Here he halted, and beckoning to his attendants, dismounted
and gave back the horse to their charge, saying as he did so--

"How long shall I continue a child in your opinion?"

Such is one of the recorded characteristic anecdotes of Prince Henry
Stuart, eldest son of James the First of England.

Henry was only nine years old when a certain event entirely changed the
prospects and circumstances of his early home. Instead of being the
poor king of a poverty-stricken country, his father suddenly became
monarch of one of the richest and most powerful countries of Europe. In
other words, on the death of Queen Elizabeth James the Sixth of Scotland
found himself James the First of England.

He came to the throne amid the mingled joy and misgivings of his new
subjects. How soon he destroyed the one and confirmed the other,
history has recorded, and we are not going to dwell upon that here,
except to say that one of the few redeeming points about James the First
in the eyes of the people was that he had a son who promised to make up
by his virtues for all the vice and silliness of his father. They could
endure the whims of their ill-conditioned king all the better for
knowing that after him was to come a prince after their own heart, one
of English sympathies and English instincts; one who even as a boy had
won their hearts by his pluck, his frankness, and his wit, and who, as
he grew up, developed into a manhood as vigorous and noble as that of
his father was mean and imbecile.

Henry was, as we have said, emphatically an English boy--not in birth,
for his father was Scotch and his mother a Dane--but in every other
respect in which an English boy has a distinctive character. He was
brave and honest, and merry and generous;