“It is not a story of Nottingham, but of Gotham, near Nottingham. It is about the Wise Men.”
“Who went to sea in a bowl?” asked Frank.
“No, they were much wiser than that. I will try to tell it in the way Master Lewis tells his stories: in the rather decorated style.”
“I hope you will always have as nice a sense of honor as you show now,” said Master Lewis, “whenever you make the slightest change from plain truth to parable. You have a tact for story-telling, for one so young; and you studied up the story of ‘The Frolicsome Duke,’ which you told the Club, in a manner that quite surprised us. I hope this story will prove as entertaining.”
THE STORY OF THE WISE MEN OF GOTHAM.
“More than six hundred and fifty years ago, there reigned in England a king, named John. They called him Sansterre or Lackland, for, unlike his brothers, he had received from his father no fiefs.
“He was the son of Henry Plantagenet, a good king, as kings went in those rude times, who governed England for thirty-four years.
“His mother was Eleanora of Aquitaine, who was, in her day, the prettiest girl in France. But she was a wilful little woman and full of craft. She married the French king first, but, not liking him on account of his monkish ways, she procured a divorce, and told Henry Plantagenet, who was young and handsome and gay, that she would like to marry him. He accepted the proposal, because the union would add to his dominions several provinces. Henry loved Rosamond Clifford,—‘Fair Rosamond,’—whom he had met in the valley of the Wye, and who was the prettiest girl in all the world.
“The marriage proved an unhappy one. Henry soon discovered what a wily, wilful little woman she was; he tried to curb her, and a terrible time he had.
“Richard succeeded his father. It was he who made the grandest crusade of the Middle Ages; who was married at Cyprus in flower-time; who fought with noble Saladin at Acre and Jaffa; who was obliged to sail away from the Holy Land; who looked back from his beautiful ship on the unconquered coast with regret; who was shipwrecked and cast upon a hostile coast; and who was discovered, when imprisoned in a gloomy old castle on the Danube, by the harp of Blondel the Troubadour.