CHAPTER ONE.
HOW I SAW MY QUEEN.
Every story, whether wise or foolish, grave or gay, must needs have a beginning.

How it comes to pass that my story begins on a certain day in May, in the year of our Lord 1585, I can never, although I am far on in life now, properly explain.
For that was not the day on which I was born.

That adventure had befallen me eighteen years before, at the parson's little house in Felton Regis.

Most people who write their histories have a pride in dragging their readers back to the moment when they first hallooed defiance to this wicked world; but I, since I have clean forgotten the event, must e'en confess that my story does not begin there.

A like adventure chanced often at the parsonage, and, at nine years of age, I reigned king absolute over a nursery full of her Majesty's subjects who called me brother, and quailed before my nod like Helots before the crest of a Spartan.