I Crown Thee King; A Romance (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated.1902 Excerpt: ... CHAPTER XXI "REX" "We figure to ourselves The thing we like."--Henry Taylor. FROST and snow, whitened bough and jewelled leaf fade to my sight; I see the great house at Ollerton in my fancy, and Roy and my lady at the lattice there--and so the vision passes, the book is closed, the record of merry Master Miles has found its "Finis." No longer do I ride with Roy in Sherwood Forest, but awake to reality upon the sward at Fontainebleau; there to behold the summer ripeness and the glory of bud and blossom, and the sparkling burn which drones at my very feet. I am in France, and for me Sherwood is no more. The figures of my book vanish in the mists of waking. I have read the story to the last line--the story that Master Miles of Kirkby-in-Ashfield told so often to them that sought him out. A legend some would say, yet history has told us that it is no legend. Roy, Count of Brives, sent by his father to Bolton Abbey, has left descendants who yet may be found in the country of his birth. How that he lived for thirty years, the master of Ollerton, is a written record in the annals of the house. By what skill of defence, by what help of the men of Sherwood, he helc Ollerton, we now know, truly. To my lady he swore that her home should be his home--and so he made it. The first four years of Mary's reign find in Ollerton church the witness of his children's birth. He was at Ollerton when Elizabeth was crowned, and she has named him among the foremost of the Northmen. And while we know that some years of his married life were passed at his father's house in Vincennes, when he took upon him the duties of his estate, none the less his heart was ever in England, and thither he returned when duty permitted him, "all gladly and with sure affection," as his own word says. In...