of a tall, fair-haired lad of good mien and handsome
visage, who, dressed as a servant, accompanied the cavalcade. If the
projectile had effectively hit instead of missed the stripling, the whole
history of the world from that hour to this would have been changed, for
this youth was Prince Ferdinand, the heir of Aragon, who was being
conveyed secretly by a faction of Castilian nobles to marry the Princess
Isabel, who had been set forward as a pretender to her brother's throne,
to the exclusion of the King's doubtful daughter, the hapless Beltraneja.
A hurried cry of explanation went up from the travellers: a shouted
password; the flashing of torches upon the walls, the joyful recognition
of those within, and the gates swung open, the drawbridge dropped, and
thenceforward Prince Ferdinand was safe, surrounded by the men-at-arms of
Isabel's faction. Within a week the eighteen-years-old bridegroom greeted
his bride, and before the end of the month Ferdinand and Isabel were
married at Valladolid.

To most observers it may have seemed a small thing that a petty prince in
the extreme corner of Europe had married the girl pretender to the
distracted and divided realm of Castile; but there was one cunning, wicked
old man in Barcelona who was fully conscious of the importance of the
match that he had planned; and he, John II. of Aragon, had found an apt
pupil in his son Ferdinand, crafty beyond his years. To some extent Isabel
must have seen it too, for she was already a dreamer of great dreams which
she meant to come true, and the strength of Aragon behind her claim would
insure her the sovereignty that was to be the first step in their
realisation.

This is not the place to tell how the nobles of Castile found to their
dismay that in Ferdinand and Isabel they had raised a King Stork instead
of King Log to the throne, and how the Queen, strong as a man, subtle as a
woman, crushed and chicaned her realms into order and obedience. The aims
of Ferdinand and his father in effecting the union of Aragon and Castile
by marriage went far beyond the Peninsula in which they lived. For ages
Aragon had found its ambitions checked by the consolidation of France. The
vision of a great Romance empire, stretching from Valencia to Genoa, and
governed from Barcelona or Saragossa, had been dissipated when Saint Louis
wrung from James the Conqueror, in the thirteenth century, his recognition
of French suzerainty over Provence.

But Aragonese eye