Raleigh’s friend added that the Government had ordered the arrest and immediate trial of the murderer, as the man assassinated was one of the principal servants of the Spanish ambassador.
“Excuse me,” said Raleigh, “but I cannot have been deceived as you suppose, for I was eye-witness to the events, which took place under my own window; and the man fell there on that spot where you see a paving stone standing up above the rest.”
“My dear Sir Walter,” replied his friend, “I was sitting on that stone when the fray took place, and I received this slight scratch on my cheek in snatching the sword from the murderer. Upon my word of honor, you were deceived in every particular.”
Sir Walter, when alone, took up the second volume of his history, which was in manuscript, and, contemplating it, thought: “If two men see the same thing so differently—nay, if I cannot believe my own eyes, how can I be assured of the truth of a tithe of the events which happened ages before I was born?” and he flung the manuscript into the fire.
Charles Dudley Warner, travelling in Nubia and Egypt, asserts that “The Arabian Nights’ Entertainment” is the best history ever written. In the light of the above facts, perhaps it is.
ST. ANTHONY’S FISH-SERMON.
From a German versification of a passage from the works of Abraham à Santa Clara, a Jesuit preacher of the Seventeenth Century.
St. Anthony, one day
Found the Church empty, Sunday: