On this occasion, as at different times during the evening, Raleigh
addressed himself to Tressilian, and was not a little surprised at
his vague and unsatisfactory answers; which, joined to his leaving his
apartment without any assigned reason, appearing in an undress when
it was likely to be offensive to the Queen, and some other symptoms of
irregularity which he thought he discovered, led him to doubt whether
his friend did not labour under some temporary derangement.

Meanwhile, the Queen had no sooner stepped on the bridge than a new
spectacle was provided; for as soon as the music gave signal that she
was so far advanced, a raft, so disposed as to resemble a small floating
island, illuminated by a great variety of torches, and surrounded by
floating pageants formed to represent sea-horses, on which sat Tritons,
Nereids, and other fabulous deities of the seas and rivers, made its
appearance upon the lake, and issuing from behind a small heronry where
it had been concealed, floated gently towards the farther end of the
bridge.

On the islet appeared a beautiful woman, clad in a watchet-coloured
silken mantle, bound with a broad girdle inscribed with characters like
the phylacteries of the Hebrews. Her feet and arms were bare, but her
wrists and ankles were adorned with gold bracelets of uncommon size.
Amidst her long, silky black hair she wore a crown or chaplet of
artificial mistletoe, and bore in her hand a rod of ebony tipped with
silver. Two Nymphs attended on her, dressed in the same antique and
mystical guise.

The pageant was so well managed that this Lady of the Floating Island,
having performed her voyage with much picturesque effect, landed at
Mortimer's Tower with her two attendants just as Elizabeth presented
herself before that outwork. The stranger then, in a well-penned speech,
announced herself as that famous Lady of the Lake renowned in the
stories of King Arthur, who had nursed the youth of the redoubted Sir
Lancelot, and whose beauty 'had proved too powerful both for the wisdom
and the spells of the mighty Merlin. Since that early period she had
remained possessed of her crystal dominions, she said, despite the
various men of fame and might by whom Kenilworth had been successively
tenanted. 'The Saxons, the Danes, the Normans, the Saintlowes, the
Clintons, the Montforts, the Mortimers, the Plantagenets, great though
they were in arms and magnificence, had never, she said, caused her
to raise