atin that I should ha'
mastered at thirteen. All the travel-books are in Latin, and you have to
know it to get on in foreign parts."

"Have you been in foreign parts?"

"Four year--France and Scotland and the Low Countries. But I got enough
o' seeing Christians kill one another, and says I to myself, John Smith,
you go see what they're about at home. And here I found our fen-sludgers
all by the ears over Bishops and Papists and Brownists and such like. In
Holland they let a man read's Bible in peace."

"Is that the Bible you got there?"

"Nay--Marcus Aurelius Antoninus--a mighty wise old chap, if he was an
Emperor. And I've got Niccolo Macchiavelli's seven books o' the Art o'
War. When I'm weary of one I take to t' other, and between times I ride
a tilt." He waved his hand toward a ring fastened on a tree, and a lance
and horse-furniture leaning against the trunk.

"Our folks be Separatists," the boy said.

"Well, and what of it?" laughed the young man. "As I was a-reading
here--a man is what his thoughts make him. Be he Catholic or Church
Protestant or Baptist, he's what he's o' mind to be, good or bad. Other
folk's say-so don't stop him--no more than them badgers' worryin' dams
the brook."

This was a new idea to Will. His hunger for books was so keen that it
had seemed to him that without them, he would be stupid as the swine.
John Smith seemed to understand it, for he added,

"You bide here with me awhile, lad. Maybe there's a way for you to get
learning, yet."

Will shared the leafy booth and simple fare of his new friend for a
fortnight, doing errands, rubbing down the black horse, Tamlane, and at
odd times learning his conjugations. When John Smith left his hermitage
and went to fight against the Turks in Transylvania, he placed a little
sum of money with a Puritan scholar at Scrooby to pay for the boy's
schooling for a year or two. The yeoman uncle had a family of his own to
provide for, and was glad to have Will off his hands.

Transylvania in 1600 was on the very frontier of Christendom. John Smith
needed all the philosophy he had learned from his favorite author when,
after many adventures, he was taken prisoner and sent to the
slave-market of Axopolis to be sold. Bogal, a Turkish pacha, bought the
young Englishman to send as a gift to his future wife, Charatza
Tragabigzanda, in Constantinople.

Chained by the neck in gangs of twenties the slaves entered the great
Moslem city. John Smith was lef