“Have you done anything, Billy?”
“I’ve an idea coming, but I haven’t chased it down to paper yet.”
“Are you going to try, Redtop?” Hugh’s thin little voice finished in a low rumble that made the rest laugh.
“Me? I couldn’t draw a flag-pole that anybody’d recognize unless it was labelled.”
Billy tried hard to keep the talk brisk, yet his own mind wandered. He was thinking unusual thoughts. Something in the lush fragrant woods, in the silence and the leaping flames,—or was it the feeling that other denizens might be prowling near?—recalled “The Idyls of the King,” that king
“Whose glory was redressing human wrong.”
All his boyhood Billy had wished he might have lived in the olden days of chivalry, when men gave their lives for the succor of the weak and wronged. The glitter and splendor of court and tournament described in Tennyson’s ringing, singing lines, thrilled him; stirred a passion that he hid within the silence of his own heart, since he found few that understood the feeling. Hugh and May Nell were the only ones of his friends who felt as he did about the ideals of chivalry. Erminie either looked at him in wonder or laughed at him for a visionary.
But to-night the world-old stories of high adventure, where all was risked for love of humanity, came to him with new force, culminating in a sudden vision of what the tragedy on Calvary meant. There could have been no good deed done in the past that was not possible to-day; and perhaps this very quest for the little child was as worthy as the romantic deeds of Arthur’s knights.
Suddenly Billy straightened, and began to tell the story of that famed Round Table where sat the knights of the king, Launcelot, Sir Percivale; Merlin, the Magician, and his evil fate, Vivien. He told of the pitiful Elaine, the beautiful queen, and how she wrecked Arthur’s court, and of Sir Galahad and his search for the Holy Grail.
At first the boys were not interested; but Billy’s voice deepened with earnestness; and the fire declined, leaving only its glowing heart changing, gleaming, and paling like a monster opal, while the silent forest drew closer, seemed to reach down and clasp them, till almost they felt themselves transported to those