ss, cruel,
wasteful men! What could they have been thinking of?"

"They were thinking of getting what is called 'blood-money.' One hundred
pounds for Robin Lyth. Dead or alive--one hundred pounds."...

"Then are you the celebrated Robin Lyth--the new Robin Hood, as they
call him? The man who can do almost anything?"

"Mistress Anerley, I am Robin Lyth; but, as you have seen, I cannot do
much.... They have missed the best chance they ever had at me; it will
make their temper very bad. If they shot at me again, they could do no
good. Crooked mood makes crooked mode."

"You forget that I should not see such things. You may like very much to
be shot at; but--but you should think of other people."

"I shall think of you only--I mean of your great kindness, and your
promise to keep my ring for me. Of course you will tell nobody. Carroway
will have me like a tiger if you do. Farewell, young lady--for one week,
fare well." With a wave of his hat he was gone, before Mary had time to
retract her promise; and she thought of her mother.

WILLIAM BLAKE

(1757-1827)

Poet-painter, visionary, and super-mystic in almost all capacities,
William Blake was born in London in 1757. He was the second son of
humble people--his father but a stocking merchant. An "odd little boy,"
he was destined to be recognized as "one of the most curious and
abnormal personages of the later eighteenth and earlier nineteenth
centuries." Allan Cunningham describes him by saying that Blake at ten
years of age was an artist and at twelve a poet. He seems really to have
shown in childhood his double gift. But the boy's education was
rudimentary, his advantages not even usual, it would seem. To the end of
his life, the mature man's works betray a defective common-schooling, a
lamentable lack of higher intellectual training--unless we suspect that
the process would have disciplined his mind, to the loss of bizarre
originality. Most of what Blake learned he taught himself, and that at
haphazard. The mistiness and inexplicability of his productions is part
of such a process, as well as of invincible temperament.

[Illustration: William Blake]

In 1767 Blake was studying drawing with Mr. Pars, at the sometime famous
Strand Academy, where he was reckoned a diligent but egotistical pupil.
At fourteen he became apprenticed, for a livelihood,--afterward
exchanged for the painter's and illustrator's freer career,--to James
Basire, an academic but excell