constructed, after the fashion of ballista or catapult, by the use
of a mode he had discovered of immeasurably increasing the strength
of springs, so that stones of a hundredweight might be thrown into a
city from a quarter of a mile's distance without any noise audible
to those within. It was this device he was brooding over when
Dorothy came upon him by the arblast. Nor did the conviction arise
from any prejudice against fire-arms, for he had, among many other
wonderful things of the sort, in cannons, sakers, harquebusses,
muskets, musquetoons, and all kinds, invented a pistol to discharge
a dozen times with one loading, and without so much as new priming
being once requisite, or the possessor having to change it out of
one hand into the other, or stop his horse.

One who had happened to see lord Herbert as he went about within his
father's walls, busy yet unhasting, earnest yet cheerful, rapid in
all his movements yet perfectly composed, would hardly have imagined
that a day at a time, or perhaps two, was all he was now able to
spend there, days which were to him as breathing-holes in the ice
to the wintered fishes. For not merely did he give himself to the
enlisting of large numbers of men, but commanded both horse and
foot, meeting all expenses from his own pocket, or with the
assistance of his father. A few months before the period at which my
story has arrived, he had in eight days raised six regiments,
fortified Monmouth and Chepstow, and garrisoned half-a-dozen smaller
but yet important places. About a hundred noblemen and gentlemen
whom he had enrolled as a troop of life-guards, he furnished with
the horses and arms which they were unable to provide with
sufficient haste for themselves. So prominenf indeed were his
services on behalf of the king, that his father was uneasy because
of the jealousy and hate it would certainly rouse in the minds of