den, and, the pale being
down, the charming young Lady Effingham, his old friend Nottingham's
daughter, strolls by along the terrace on the arm of the Countess of
Beaumont. The ladies lean over the paling, and watch the picturesque old
magician poring over his crucibles, his face lighted up with the flames
from his furnace. They fall a chatting with him, and Lady Effingham
coaxes him to spare her a little of that famous balsam which he brought
back from Guiana. He tells her that he has none prepared, but that he
will send her some by their common friend Captain Whitlock, and
presently he does so. A captivity which admitted such communications
with the outer world as this, could not but have had its alleviations.

The letter quoted on the last page evidently belongs to the summer of
1605, when, for a few months, Raleigh was undoubtedly in great
discomfort. On August 15, Sir George Harvey was succeeded by Sir William
Waad, who had shown Raleigh great severity before his trial. He,
however, although not well disposed, shrank from actually ill-treating
his noble prisoner. He hinted to Lord Salisbury that he wanted the
garden for his own use, and that he thought the paling an insufficient
barrier between Raleigh and the world. Meanwhile Salisbury did not take
the hint, and the brick wall Waad wished built up was not begun. Waad
evidently looked upon the chemical experiments with suspicion. 'Sir
Walter Raleigh,' he wrote, 'hath converted a little hen-house in the
garden into a still, where he doth spend his time all the day in his
distillations.' Some of the remedies which the prisoner invented became
exceedingly popular. His 'lesser cordial' of strawberry water was
extensively used by ladies, and his 'great cordial,' which was
understand to contain 'whatever is most choice and sovereign in the
animal, vegetable, and mineral world,' continued to be a favourite
panacea until the close of the century.

When, in November, Gunpowder Plot was discovered, Sir Walter Raleigh was
for a moment suspected. No evidence was found inculpating him in the
slightest degree; but his life was, for the moment at least, made
distinctly harder. When he returned from examination, the wall which
Waad had desired to put between the prisoner and the public was in
course of construction. When finished it was not very formidable, for
Waad complains that Raleigh was in the habit of standing upon it, in the
sight of passers-by. The increased confinement