electricity
both lay dormant, could have entered into the lives of two bright young
maidens so many leagues removed from one another--Zenobia, the dusky
Palmyrean of the East, and Helena, the fresh-faced English girl of the
West.

But to such distant and widely separated confines had this power of the
vast Empire extended; and to this thoughtful young princess, drifting
down the winding English river, the sense of Roman supremacy and power
would come again and again.

For this charming young girl--said, later, to have been the most
beautiful woman of her time in England--though reared to Roman ways and
Roman speech, had too well furnished a mind not to think for herself.
"She spake," so says the record, "many tongues and was replete with
piety." The only child of King Coel, her doting old father had given
her the finest education that Rome could offer. She was, even before she
grew to womanhood, so we are told, a fine musician, a marvellous worker
in tapestry, in hammered brass and pottery, and was altogether as wise
and wonderful a young woman as even these later centuries can show.

But, for all this grand education, she loved to hear the legends and
stories of her people that in various ways would come to her ears,
either as the simple tales of her British nurse, or in the wild songs of
the wandering bards, or singers.

As she listened to these she thought less of those crude and barbaric
ways of her ancestors that Rome had so vastly bettered than of their
national independence and freedom from the galling yoke of Rome, and,
as was natural, she cherished the memory of Boadicea, the warrior queen,
and made a hero of the fiery young Caractacus.

It is always so, you know. Every bright young imagination is apt to find
greater glories in the misty past, or grander possibilities in a still
more misty future than in the too practical and prosaic present in which
both duty and destiny lie. And so Helena the princess, Leaning against
the soft cushions of her gilded barge, had sighed for the days of the
old-time British valor and freedom, and, even as she looked off toward
the approaching triareme, she was wondering how she could awake to
thoughts of British glory her rather heavy-witted father, Coel the
King--an hereditary prince of that ancient Britain in which he was now,
alas, but a tributary prince of the all too powerful Rome.

Now, "old King Cole," as Mother Goose tells us--for young Helena's
father was none ot