udy. The two big volumes of the scientific
cyclopaedia had been his school-masters, and he had striven faithfully to
learn of them. What a wonderful lesson it had been, for while there was
much in this teaching that he could not understand at all, there was
much again that, with the aid of the illustrations and diagrams, he
could make really his own. And so, little by little, he had been able to
reconstruct, in imagination, at least, the lost civilization of the
ancient world; how men had tamed the lightning and bade it speak their
will and work their pleasure; how the same vapor that issued from the
pot bubbling on Martina's fire could be harnessed and made to draw a
hundred wagons at once upon the old-time steel-railed highways; how a
child's hand on the crank of a machine-gun might hurl invisible death
among a regiment of men and put even an army to flight. Steam and
gunpowder and electricity, what wonderful ideas were connoted in the
words! The very names thrilled him with a sense of infinite power.

A wonderfully fascinating study, and yet at times it left him
unspeakably weary and depressed, for what did all this knowledge avail
without the practical means to apply it? The great machines that the
ancients had built, what were they now but masses of red rust, useless
alike to the fool who laughed at them and to the visionary who could
only dream of their magnificent potentialities.

A dream, for, in truth, a lion was in the way. So long as the Doomsmen
held sway in the land, so long must the wheels of progress stay locked.
Unable to use themselves the treasures of knowledge stored under their
hands, they were unwilling that another should even touch them. What
could he or any other one man do?

Once, indeed, during the three years, Constans had found brief
opportunity to revisit the scenes of his old home in the valley of the
Swiftwater. In this general district of the West Inch were to be found
nearly all of the larger estates, a fitting cradling-place, it would
seem, for the new liberty, the awakening era.

But time was not yet come, as Constans soon saw clearly. He had been
hospitably enough received, for the country-side had not forgotten the
story of the Greenwood Keep, and it was plain to see that this
clear-eyed, well-set-up lad was of the true Stockader breed. One of his
father's bond-friends, Piers Major, of the River Barony, had even
offered Constans a home under his roof-tree in exchange for
sword-se