“No, it isn't; but it can't be helped. Indeed, they knew so little about him way back even in the fifth century, that one of the popes, when he made up a list of the saints, said 'he was one of those whose names are justly reverenced among men, but whose actions are known only to God.'”
“You talk just like a book,” remarked Donald, to whom Harold, with his knowledge of men and things, was a never-ceasing wonder.
“And good reason why, for I got it out of a book. Don't you remember I told you I'd studied up about it?”
“Oh, yes,” as though thankful there was some sort of explanation for such uncanny erudition.
“But how does this St. George come to be mixed up with the Knights of the Garter?” asked Marie-Celeste.
“This is the way of it. You know what the Crusades were?” Marie-Celeste nodded yes, but intimating, with a significant glance in the direction of Donald and Albert, that probably they did not, Harold took the hint, and began over again.
“Well, ever so many years ago great armies of men went out from England to try and get possession of the Holy Land, and each time an army went out they called it a crusade, and on the first one the leader of the army prayed to St. George to help him, and as he was very successful, that made St. George's name very famous. Then afterward Richard Cour de Lion, when he went to the Holy Land, put himself under St. George's protection, and from that time he became the patron saint of England, and that means, Albert” (for Albert looked the question he longed to ask), “that England regarded him as the saint who would help her most and be her special guardian.”
“Yes,” said Marie-Celeste, since Harold apparently considered he had come to a natural pause in the narrative; “but you haven't told us what St. George and the Knights of the Garter have to do with each other.”
“So I haven't; well, all the connection that I know of is, that every year a feast in honor of St. George was ordered to be kept as a holiday, and that the Order of the Garter was founded on that day—St. George's Day—and that so the Cross of St. George and the Garter of the Knights came to be a sort of double emblem for the order.”
By this time the children had reached the Norman Gate, and crossing the quadrangle, Harold led the way into the State apartments, and being well known to most of the guides of the castle, was allowed, with his little party, to pass on unattended, and to make his way straight to the Grand Banqueting Hall. From the moment they entered the castle, Donald was of no use as far as receiving instruction was concerned. This being his first visit to any castle whatever, he was far too much astonished and overawed by everything he saw to be able to think of applying his mind to mere historical detail.