ness, he was armed with letters to Prester John, the traditional
Christian prince of the Far East; and his first landfall, as we know
now, was by him supposed to be an outlying portion of that vast region
vaguely known to the explorers who followed Marco Polo, as Farther
India. But centuries rolled away before the world saw the facts of
geography as we know them, or learned to accept as true the marvellous
stories of Marco Polo, whose priceless legacy was first dimly known to
the few, and was dubbed the Romance of the Great Khan.

[Signature: Noah Brooks.]

SIR WILLIAM WALLACE

(1270-1305)

The life and exploits of this most popular national hero of the Scots
have been principally preserved in a legendary form by poetry and
tradition, and are only to a very small extent matter of contemporary
record, or illustrated by authentic documents. There is no extant
Scottish chronicler of the age of Wallace. Fordun, the earliest of his
countrymen from whom we have any account of him, is his junior by nearly
a century. Wyntoun, the next authority, is still half a century later.
His chief celebrator is the metrical writer Blind Harry, or Harry the
Minstrel, whose work confesses itself by its very form to be quite as
much of a fiction as a history, and whose era, at any rate, is supposed
to be nearly two centuries subsequent to that of his hero. Some few
facts, however, may be got out of the English annalists Trivet and
Hemingford, who were the contemporaries of Wallace.

[Illustration: Sir William Wallace.]

There are contradictory statements of the year of his birth, but it is
probable he was born about 1270. His family was one of some distinction,
and he is said to have been the younger of the two sons of Sir Malcolm
Wallace, of Elderslie and Auchinbothie, in the neighborhood of Paisley.
His mother, who according to one account was Sir Malcolm's second wife,
is stated by the genealogists to have been Margaret, daughter of Sir
Raynald or Reginald (other authorities say Sir Hugh) Crawford, who held
the office of Sheriff of Ayr.

The history of Wallace down to the year 1297 is entirely legendary, and
only to be found in the rhymes of Harry the Minstrel; though many of the
facts which Harry relates still live as popular traditions in the
localities where the scenes of them are laid, whether handed down in
that way from the time when they happened, or only derived from his
poem, which long continued to be the literary