“And then we only got back by being tied up in bags, so that they thought we were barley.”
“Oh, tell us all about it,” cried the others.
And as they cared to hear it, perhaps you will care to hear it, and so here is their story from beginning to end.
The Story of the Children and the Gipsies.
Charlotte and Henry Spencer lived with their father and mother at Blenheim Palace, in the County of Oxfordshire. Blenheim Palace was the name of their home, and it may be seen to this day, standing in all its magnificence in the midst of a great park. For Charlotte and Henry were the children of the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough, and Blenheim Palace was the gift of a grateful nation to their great-grandfather, John Churchill, the first duke. He it is you read of in your History books, who won the battles of Ramilies and Malplaquet, Oudenarde and Blenheim, fighting against the French; and his Duchess Sarah was famous for her beauty, and was the friend of Queen Anne.
Reynolds.
THE FORTUNE-TELLER.
These children then lived, as I have said, at this great Palace, and were dressed in red velvet and feathers, and taught to dance the minuet and gavotte. There were no trains in their day, and no telegrams or motor-cars. They travelled by the stage-coach if they came up to London, and life was in many ways rougher and cruder then than it is now.
If a message were needed, a man had to saddle a horse and gallop miles with it, or perhaps foot-runners were engaged. And this means that a man, footsore and mud-stained, might arrive suddenly at your father’s door, having run or ridden over half the country, with a note to deliver in his hand. Charlotte and Henry knew a very different England to what we know now in many ways; yet essentially it was the same. The flower seeds in their garden plots grew in just the same manner as do yours, and when they went bird-nesting they found just the same kind of nests in the same kind of hiding-places as you do now. The wren’s nest, made of last year’s leaves, because it is built in a beech-wood, and the one made of green moss, because it is built in a yew-tree; these they knew just as you know them, because these belong to the kind of things that don’t change. So you may imagine them, when at last they had finished their lessons, which occupied many more hours of the day than yours, you may imagine them running out to the hay-field, which looked to them just as you see it, or running to the dairy, which held the same cool pans of creamy milk. But in one way perhaps their condition was different; they were so rarely left alone. They had always a nurse or governess or a tutor with them; and if they were with their parents, they had to sit so quiet in the large rooms that it was little or no pleasure to be there. They lived in the days that Miss Taylor writes of when she says: