Author of "In the Days of the Guild", "Masters of the Guild", etc. illustrated by FLORENCE CHOATE and ELIZABETH CURTIS new york FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY publishers Copyright, 1921, by Frederick A. Stokes Company All rights reserved, including that of translation into foreign languages Made in the United States of America...

A red fox ran into the empty church. In the middle of the floor he sat up and looked around. Nothing stirred—not the painted figures on the wooden walls, nor the boy who now stood in the doorway. This boy was gray-eyed and flaxen-haired, and might have been eleven or twelve years old. He was looking for the good old priest, Father Ansgar, and the wild shy animal eyeing him from the foot of the altar made it only too clear that the church, like the village, was deserted. Father Ansgar was dead of

Salt and scarred from the northern seas, the Taernan , deep-laden with herring, nosed in at the Hanse quay in Bergen. Thorolf Erlandsson looked grimly up at the huge warehouses. Since the Hanseatic League secured a foothold in Norway, in 1343, most Norwegian ports had been losing trade, and Bergen, or rather the Hanse merchants in Bergen, had been getting it. Between the Danes and the Germans it looked rather as if Norwegians were to be crowded out of their own country. The Hanse traders not onl

"Those things that you say cannot be true, Fernao! How do you know that the sea turns black and dreadful just behind those heavenly clouds? If there are hydras, and gorgons, and sea-snakes that can swallow a ship, and a great black hand reaching up out of a whirlpool to drag men down, why do we never see them here? Look at that sea, can there be anything in the world more beautiful?" The vehement small speaker waved her slender hand with a gesture that seemed to take in half the horizon. The old

Juan de la Cosa, captain of the Santa Maria , was prowling about the beach of Gomera in a thoroughly dissatisfied frame of mind. His own ship, the Gallego before the Admiral re-christened her and made her his flagship, was riding trim as a mallard within sight of his eye. She would never have kept the fleet waiting in the Canaries for a little thing like a broken rudder. It was the Pinta that had done this, and it was the veteran pilot's private opinion that she would behave much better if her o

"Nombre de San Martin! who is that up there like a cat?" "Un gato! Cucarucha en palo!" "If Alonso de Ojeda hears of your calling him a cockroach on a mast, he will grind your ribs to a paste with a cudgel (os moliesen las costillas a puros palos)!" observed a pale, sharp-faced lad in a shabby doublet. The sailor who had made the comparison glanced at him and chuckled. "Your pardon—hidalgo. I have been at sea so much of late that the comparison jumped into my mind. Is he a caballero then?" "One o

"But of what use is a King's patent," said Hugh Thorne of Bristol, "if the harbors be locked?" The Italian merchant glanced up from his papers and smiled, which was all the answer the Englishman seemed to expect, for he stormed on, "Here have we better fleeces than Spain, better wheat than France, finer cattle than the Netherlands, the tin of Cornwall, the flax of Kent and Durham, and our people starve or live rudely because of the fettering of our trade." "'T is a sad misfortune," said the merc

"Translators," observed Amerigo Vespucci, "are frequently traitors. Now who is to be surety that yonder interpreter does not change your words in repeating them?" Alonso de Ojeda touched the hilt of his poniard. "This," he said. "Toledo steel speaks all languages." The Florentine's black eyebrows lifted a little, but he did not pursue the subject. Ojeda was not the sort of man likely to be convinced of anything he did not believe already, and Vespucci was having too good a time to waste it in ar

"They fight among themselves too much. They need the man with the whip." " Bough! wough! " " Yar-r-rh! arrh!—agh! " A spirited and entertaining dog-fight was going on just outside the house of the governor of Darien. The deep sullen roar of Balboa's big hound Leoncico was as unmistakable as the snarling, snapping, furious bark of Cacafuego, who belonged to the Bachelor Enciso. The two hated each other at sight, months ago. Now they were having it out. The man with the whip evidently came on the

"Elephants' teeth?" "A fair lot, but I am sick of the Guinea coast. The Lisbon slavers get more of black ivory than we do of the white." The good Jean Parmentier, who asked the question, and the youth called Jean Florin, who answered it, were looking at a stanch weather-beaten little cargo-ship anchored in the harbor of Dieppe. She had been to the Gold Coast, where wild African chiefs conjured elephants' tusks out of the mysterious back country and traded them for beads, trinkets and gay cloth.

If the Fathers of the Church had ever been on the other side of the world, they would have made new rules for it. So thought Jerónimo Aguilar, on board a caravel plying between Darien and Hispaniola. It was a thought he would hardly have dared think in Spain. He was a dark thin young friar from the mountains near Seville. In 1488 his mother, waiting, as women must, for news from the wars, vowed that if God and the Most Catholic Sovereigns drove out the Moors and sent her husband home to her, she

"Glory is all very well," said Juan de Saavedra to Pedro de Alvarado as the squadron left the island of Cozumel, "but my familiar spirit tells me that there is gold somewhere in this barbaric land or Cortes would not be with us." Alvarado's peculiarly sunny smile shone out. He was a ruddy golden-haired man, a type unusual in Spaniards, and the natives showed a tendency to revere him as the sun-god. Life had treated him very well, and he had an abounding good-nature. "It will be the better," he s

"What shall I bring thee then, from the world's end, Reine Margot?" asked Alain Maclou. The small girl in the deep fireside recess of a Picardy castle-hall considered it gravely. "There should be three gifts," she said at last, "for so it always is in Mère Bastienne's stories. I will have the shoes of silence, the girdle of fortune, and diamonds from Norumbega. Tell me again about Norumbega." "Nay, little one, I must go, to see after the lading of the ship. Fare thee well for this time," and the

"Cavalry without horses, in ships without sailors, built by blacksmiths without forges and carpenters without tools. Now who in Spain will believe that?" commented Cabeça de Vaca. It was the evening of the twenty-first of September, 1528. Five of the oddest looking boats ever launched on any sea were drawn up on the shore of La Baya de Cavallos, where not a horse was in sight, though there had been twoscore a fortnight ago. On the morrow the one-eyed commander of the Spaniards, Pamfilo de Narvae

"Paris is no place in these times for a Huguenot lad from Navarre," said Dominic de Gourgues, of Mont-de-Marsan in Gascony. "His father, François Debré, did me good service in the Spanish Indies. One of these days, Philip and his bloodhounds will be pulled down by these young terriers they have orphaned." "If the Jesuits have their way all Huguenots will be exterminated, men, women and children," said Laudonnière, with a gleam of melancholy sarcasm in his dark pensive eyes. "Life to a Jesuit is

White fog, the thick mist of windless marshes, masked the Kentish coast. The Medway at flood-tide from Sheerness to Gillingham Reach was one maze of creeks and bends and inlets and tiny bays. Nothing was visible an oar's length overside but shifting cloudy shapes that bulked obscurely in the fog. But although this was Francis Drake's first voyage as master of his own ship, he knew these waters as he knew the palm of his hand. His old captain, dying a bachelor, had left him the weather-beaten car

Primrose garlands in Coombe Wood shone with the pale gold of winter sunshine. Violets among dry leaves peered sedately at the pageant of spring. In the royal hunting forest of Richmond, venerable trees unfolded from their tiny buds canopies like the fairy pavilion of Paribanou. Philip Armadas and Arthur Barlowe, coming up from Kingston, beheld all this April beauty with the wistful pleasure of those who bid farewell to a dearly beloved land. Within a fortnight Sir Walter Ralegh's two ships, whic

"Is there not any saint of the kitchen, at all?" asked the serious-eyed little demoiselle sorting herbs under the pear-tree. Old Jacqueline, gathering the tiny fagots into her capacious apron, chuckled wisely. "There should be, if there isn't. Perhaps the good God thinks that the men will take care that there are kitchens, without His help." She hobbled briskly into the house. Helêne sat for a few minutes with hands folded, her small nose alert as a rabbit's to the marvelous blend of odors in th

All along the coast of Britain, from John o' Groat's to Beachey Head, from Saint Michael's Mount to Cape Wrath, twinkled the bonfires on the headlands. Henry Hudson, returning from a voyage among icebergs, guessed at once what this chain of lights meant. The son of Mary Queen of Scots had been crowned in London. [1] Hudson's keen eyes were unusually grave and thoughtful as the Muscovy Duck sailed up to London Pool on the incoming tide. The sailors looked even more sober, for most of them were En

Barefoot and touzle-headed, in the coarse russet and blue homespun of an apprentice, a small boy sidled through the wood. Like a hunted hedgehog, he was ready to run or fight. Where a bright brook slid into the meadows, he stopped, and looked through new leaves at the infinite blue of the sky. Words his grandfather used to read to him came back to his mind. "Let the inhabitants of the rock sing, let them shout from the top of the mountain." The Bible which old Joseph Bradford had left to his gra

Among the sources of information from which the historical material of this book are drawn are the following works: The following variant spellings in the text have been left unmodified: The following variant hyphenations in the text have been left unmodified:...