nd saying, "Now I pray God
speed thee well!" let fly.

The shaft struck the king in the left shoulder. The wound might have
been healed, but unskilful treatment made it mortal. The castle was
taken while Richard lay dying, and every soul in it hanged, as the king
had sworn, except Bertrand de Gourdon. He was brought into the king's
tent, heavily chained.

"Knave!" cried Richard, "what have I done to you that you should take my
life?"

"You have killed my father and my two brothers," answered the youth.
"You would have hanged me. Let me die now, by any torture you will. My
comfort is that no torture to me can save _you_. You, too, must die; and
through me the world is quit of you."

The king looked at him steadily, and with a gleam of clemency in his
eyes.

"Youth," he said, "I forgive you. Go unhurt."

Then turning to his chief captain, he said,--

"Take off his chains, give him a hundred shillings, and let him depart."

He fell back on his couch, and in a few minutes was dead, having
signalized his last moments with an act of clemency which had had few
counterparts in his life. His clemency was not matched by his piety. The
priests who were present at his dying bed exhorted him to repentance and
restitution, but he drove them away with bitter mockery, and died as
hardened a sinner as he had lived. It should, however, be said that this
statement of the character of Richard's death, given by the historian
Green, does not accord with that of Lingard, who says that Richard sent
for his confessor and received the sacraments with sentiments of
compunction.

As for Bertrand, the chronicles say that he failed to profit by the
kindness of the king. A dead monarch's voice has no weight in the land.
The pardoned youth was put to death.

_ROBIN HOOD AND THE KNIGHT OF THE RUEFUL COUNTENANCE._

"Where will the old duke live?" asks Oliver, in Shakespeare's "As you
like it."

"They say he is already in the forest of Arden," answers Charles, "and a
many merry men with him; and there they live like the old Robin Hood of
England, and fleet the time carelessly as they did in the golden world."

Many a merry man, indeed, was there with Robin Hood in Sherwood forest,
and, if we may believe the stories that live in the heart of English
song, there they fleeted the time as carelessly as men did in the golden
age; for Robin was king of the merry greenwood, as the Norman kings were
lords of the realm beside, and though