As well this picture shows, while home returning
From Tripoli, by royal favour guided;
Slain in the service of the cross of Christ
By wicked hands. For scarcely mass was done,
When Leicester's offspring, Guy and Simon fierce,
Pierced his young heart with unrelenting swords.
Thus did God will; lest if those barons fierce
Returned, fair England should be quite undone.
This happened in the sad twelve hundredth year
And seventieth of grace, while Charles was king.
And in Viterbo was this brave prince slain.
I pray the Queen of Heaven to take his soul again."[14]

CHAPTER II.

THE CONQUEST OF WALES—PRINCE ALPHONZO.

In our first stroll about Westminster Abbey, we saw its gray walls towering up in the midst of noisy, hurrying London. We stood in the Sacrarium and looked at the foundations of Edward the Confessor's great Norman Church. We learned how Henry the Third built the new and noble Abbey which is standing at this day. We saw how he crowned his long and troubled reign by the translation of the Confessor's body to the gorgeous shrine he had prepared for it. Let us now, standing for a moment beside this shrine, talk of a little boy whose memory is closely bound up with an important event in the history of Great Britain.

Yet first, for the sake of those who have not been to Westminster, I will try to explain the general plan of the eastern end of the Abbey. Imagine a narrow horseshoe of which the points are straight instead of being bent inwards. The space inside the horseshoe represents Edward the Confessor's Chapel; the shoe itself the ambulatory, a wide passage where the monks used to walk, and processions passed round to the shrine; and outside this passage are built, on the south the chapels of St. Edmund, and St. Nicholas; on the north the chapels of St. Paul and St. John the Baptist; while on the east of the horseshoe curve are the steps up to Henry the Seventh's Chapel. These chapels all lie behind the grand screen that runs right across the choir at the back of the altar, and are not used for service any longer, with the exception of Henry the Seventh's. All the congregation sit in the choir in front of the altar rails, and in the north and south transepts, which spread out right and left from the choir like two broad arms of a cross.

I know few more overpowering sights than the vast Sunday congregation of between three and four thousand people. The Sacrarium black with men. The wide altar steps closely packed with people who have often been waiting for more than an hour outside the doors to secure a good place. Men and women and children wedged together in the densely crowded transepts, standing willingly throughout the long service because there is not a seat left. The privileged few coming in by the comparatively empty nave from the cloisters, and taking their places in the stalls or in the seats of those connected with