die of sweetest love,
Nor wonder at my fate,
The sword which deals the blow
Is love immaculate.
Love sets my heart on fire (etc).

"So singing, and now and then discoursing on heavenly joys, the
little band reached home. And from thence it has grown, until it
has attained vast numbers. We are all over Europe. The sweet songs
of Francis have set Italy on fire. And now wherever there are
sinners to be saved, or sick in body or soul to be tended, you find
the Franciscan.

"Now I hear the bell for terce--go forth, my son, and prove your
vocation."

Chapter 12: How Hubert Gained His Spurs.

Two years had elapsed since the events related in our last two
chapters; and they had passed uneventfully, so far as the lives of
the page and the scholar are concerned.

Hubert had attained to the close of his pagedom, and the assumption
of the second degree in chivalry, that of squire. He ever longed
for the day when he should be able to fulfil his promise to his
poor stricken father, who, albeit somewhat relieved of his incubus,
since the night when father and son watched together, was not yet
quite free from his ghostly visitant; moderns would say "from his
mania."

And Martin was still fulfilling his vocation as a novice of the
Order of Saint Francis, and was close upon the attainment of the
dignity of a scholastic degree--preparatory (for so his late
lamented friend had advised) to a closer association with the
brotherhood, who no longer despised, as their father Francis did,
the learning of the schools.

We say late lamented friend, for Adam de Maresco had passed away,
full of certain hope and full assurance of "the rest which
remaineth for the people of God." He died during Martin's second
year at Oxford.

Meanwhile the political strife between the king and the barons had
reached its height. The latter felt themselves quite superseded by
the new nobility, introduced from Southern France. The English
clergy groaned beneath foreign prelates introduced, not to feed,
but to shear the flocks. The common people were ruined by excessive
and arbitrary taxation.

At last the barons determined upon constitutional resistance, and
Earl Simon, following the dictates of his conscience, felt it his
duty to cast in his lot with them, although he was the king's
brother-in-law. Still, his wife had suffered deeply at her
brother's hands, and was no "dove bearing an olive branch."

It was in Easter, 1258, and the parliament, c