him three brave sons, John, Humphrey, and Adrian; all three destined
to win knighthood also in due time, and the two latter already giving
promises, which they well fulfilled, of becoming most remarkable men
of their time. And yet the fair Champernoun, at her husband's death,
had chosen to wed Mr. Raleigh, and share life with him in the little
farm-house at Hayes. She must have been a grand woman, if the law
holds true that great men always have great mothers; an especially
grand woman, indeed; for few can boast of having borne to two
different husbands such sons as she bore. No record, as far as we
know, remains of her; nor of her boy's early years. One can imagine
them, nevertheless.

Just as he awakes to consciousness, the Smithfield fires are
extinguished. He can recollect, perhaps, hearing of the burning of
the Exeter martyrs: and he does not forget it; no one forgot or
dared forget it in those days. He is brought up in the simple and
manly, yet high-bred ways of English gentlemen in the times of 'an
old courtier of the Queen's.' His two elder half-brothers also,
living some thirty miles away, in the quaint and gloomy towers of
Compton Castle, amid the apple-orchards of Torbay, are men as noble
as ever formed a young lad's taste. Humphrey and Adrian Gilbert, who
afterwards, both of them, rise to knighthood, are--what are they
not?--soldiers, scholars, Christians, discoverers and 'planters' of
foreign lands, geographers, alchemists, miners, Platonical
philosophers; many-sided, high-minded men, not without fantastic
enthusiasm; living heroic lives, and destined, one of them, to die a
heroic death. From them Raleigh's fancy has been fired, and his
appetite for learning quickened, while he is yet a daring boy,
fishing in the gray trout-brooks, or going up with his father to the
Dartmoor hills to hunt the deer with hound and horn, amid the wooded