owers, entered the tent in which they were confined,
they thought their executioners had come; but the old man, after
solemnly asking them whether they believed indeed in a God Who had risen
from the dead, bade them be of good cheer, for such a God would surely
not desert the servants who suffered in His cause. So, with their faith
and courage strengthened in so strange a way, the Christian prisoners
waited until the good news came of the King's treaty.

Even then the peril was not over. The Sultan who had concluded the peace
was murdered by his guard, and, in the confusion which followed, the
galley to which the prisoners had been removed was boarded by a wild
band, with drawn swords. The French nobles, thinking the end had come,
fell upon their knees.

But again their lives were spared, and, soon after, De Joinville found
himself reunited to his beloved King, who, with scrupulous care, was
collecting and paying to the last farthing the sum promised as ransom.

So end De Joinville's crusading adventures, as far as Africa is
concerned, though he followed his royal master to Acre before Louis
turned his face sadly homeward. When the King set forth, twenty years
later, on his second luckless crusade, De Joinville refused to leave his
vassals, who, he said, had suffered sorely during his last campaign. He
heard from the lips of others how his master died at Tunis, with his
thoughts turning longingly still to that Jerusalem which his mortal eyes
would never see. But of this De Joinville tells us little, being
unwilling, he says, to vouch for the truth of anything that he did not
himself see and hear. And he certainly saw and heard enough to leave us
a story of fights and escapes as fascinating as any romance, and the
portrait of a king, often mistaken, indeed, but always valiant,
high-minded, and pure, whose words and deeds his old followers lovingly
recorded for the sake of generations yet to come.

MARY H. DEBENHAM.

THE GIANT OF THE TREASURE CAVES.

(_Continued from page 39._)

The children had all been so intent on the going in or staying out, that
they had not noticed how the door was slowly but surely closing on them.
No one had touched it, yet it was moving with great force. Marjorie ran
back out of the way with Georgie clinging to her arm. Alan, seizing
Estelle's hand, had barely time to stumble over the threshold when a
heavy bit of wood was hurled over him, just missing his head, and
landing on the