mer raised his beef, his pork, and his mutton; and
here lived his son Richard, as lazy and sluggish of nature as the river
along whose banks he lounged or fished or wandered as a boy, until it
was time to send him off to Felsted School, in Essex, where his
brothers, before and after him, were placed for such education as those
days provided.

A slow, good-natured, easy-going fellow was this boy Dick--"lazy Dick,"
his father often called him. He was neither as bright in mind or manner
as his younger brother Harry, nor as promising a lad as his elder
brother Robert. Robin was what this elder brother was called; he was the
delight and hope of his fond father--then called by his neighbors "the
Lord of the Fens," because of the stand he took against the King's
threatened "improvement" of the marshy fen-lands. To-day the world
honors and revels that sturdy farmer of the fens as Britain's mightiest
man--Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England.

We catch a few glimpses--not many, unfortunately--of the quiet home at
St. Ives, in which the Cromwell boys and girls lived. It was a happy and
united home, blessed with a mother whom her children revered, and having
as its head a father they honored and never dared to disobey.

But fathers in those days--two hundred and fifty years and more
ago--though stern in their ways with children, were as fond and as
loving as are the fathers of to-day, and Cromwell the farmer, Cromwell
the General, Cromwell the Lord Protector, loved his children dearly, and
labored for their good alike in the great palace at Whitehall as in the
low, timber-framed house upon the one street of St. Ives, where the
willows shivered in the wind, and the cattle grazed and fattened upon
the wide marshy meadows that lined the sluggish Ouse.

How little Dick Cromwell fared as a boy at St. Ives we have little means
of knowing. When he was ten years old--in the year 1636--the Cromwells
moved into a bigger house at Ely, fifteen miles away. It was called Ely
from the eels that wriggled about in the muddy Ouse, and is that famous
cathedral town of the fens where King Canute, who tried to order back
the tide, once bade his rowers stop his boat that he might hear the
monks of the cathedral sing.

Probably boy Dick thought more of bobbing for eels in the Ouse than of
King Canute and the monks; for there were no monks singing in England
when Richard Cromwell was a boy. There was soon to be no King in
E