n sea slime. Leaning heavily upon the arm which a sailor
held out to his assistance, he stepped into the waiting boat that rose
and fell on the heaving black waters. A boathook scraped against the
stones, and the frail craft was pushed off.

The oars dipped, and the boat slipped away through the darkness,
steering a course for the two great poop lanterns that were swinging
rhythmically high up against the black background of the night. The
elderly gentleman, huddled now in the stern-sheets, looked behind
him--to look his last upon the England he had loved and served and
ruled. The lanthorn, shedding its wheel of yellow light upon the jetty
steps, was all of it that he could now see.

He sighed, and settled down again to face the poop lights, dancing there
above the invisible hull of the ship that was to carry Edward Hyde, Earl
of Clarendon, lately Lord Chancellor of England, into exile. As a dying
man looks down the foreshortened vista of his active life, so may Edward
Hyde--whose career had reached a finality but one degree removed from
the finality of death--have reviewed in that moment those thirty years
of sincere endeavour and high achievement since he had been a law
student in the Temple when Charles I. was King.

That King he had served faithfully, so faithfully that when the
desperate fortunes of the Royalist party made it necessary to place
the Prince of Wales beyond the reach of Cromwell, it was in Sir Edward
Hyde's care that the boy was sent upon his travels. The present was not
to be Hyde's first experience of exile. He had known it, and of a bitter
sort, in those impecunious days when the Second Charles, whose steps
he guided, was a needy, homeless outcast. A man less staunch and loyal
might have thrown over so profitless a service. He had talents that
would have commanded a price in the Roundhead market. Yet staunchly
adhering to the Stuart fortunes, labouring ceaselessly and shrewdly
in the Stuart interest, employing his great ability and statecraft, he
achieved at long length the restoration of the Stuarts to the Throne of
England. And for all those loyal, self-denying labours in exile on the
Stuart behalf, all the reward he had at the time was that James Stuart,
Duke of York, debauched his daughter.

Nor did Hyde's labours cease when he had made possible the Restoration;
it was Hyde who, when that Restoration was accomplished, took in hand
and carried out the difficult task of welding together the ol