VERY long time ago a wise man said that there was always something new to be found in Africa. The Africa he knew was only that fringe of the dark continent into which the Roman arms had penetrated, but in our days, as in his, there is a charm about the stories from that mysterious land of which we have even now so much to learn. There are the travellers' tales of men who went where no white foot had trodden before them, fighting tales of men who won honour at the sword's point, and tales, just as stirring, of those who carried only the message of peace. The names of Livingstone and Gordon, Mackenzie and Hannington, should be household words in every English home, and there are others less known of whom there are stories worth the hearing.

And our first tale is told by an old French baron, aged eighty years or more, ending his life peacefully on his fair estate in Champagne. No doubt he liked to look back to the stirring days of his youth, and I dare say the young folk who gathered round his hospitable hearth knew the Sire de Joinville for a good story-teller, who could beguile a winter evening with tales of that luckless Crusade in which he bore his part, and of his hero and leader, sovereign, saint, and soldier in one, Louis, the cross-bearing King of France; and, happily for us, before the stories died with the teller, the young Queen, Jeanne of Navarre, prevailed upon him to set down his recollections.

Five and fifty years is a long time to look back upon, but doubtless it seemed but a little while to Jean de Joinville since he gathered his vassals and kindred to follow King Louis to the East. He remembered the farewell banquet, when, standing at the head of his own table, perhaps for the last time, he bade his guests speak if they had any grudge or quarrel against him, and then courteously withdrew that they might say their minds more freely. And then, when they had no fault to find, he rode away at the head of his gallant company, not daring, he tells us, to turn his eyes lest his courage should fail him at the sight of his fair home and the thought of his two bonnie boys. It required courage indeed to set sail in those days, when the travellers knew so little of the lands whither they went, and our Crusader wondered how any man dared trust himself to the ocean with unforgiven sin upon his conscience, not knowing at night where the dawn of day might find him.

But after some delay from contrary winds, and a long wait at Cyprus, the French army landed in Egypt, where the first attack was to be made; King Louis leaped, fully armed, from his galley into the sea in his eagerness to reach the shore. The Saracens fled at first before the invading army, and the city of Damietta was taken almost without a blow. There the Queen, who had followed her husband, as our good Queen Eleanor did a few years later, was left with a sufficient garrison while the army moved onwards up the Nile.

But now the tide of war began to turn. If the valour and devotion of their leaders could have given victory to the Crusaders, they must have carried all before them, but De Joinville himself owned that King Louis was more of a dauntless soldier than a good general. The Saracens harassed the troops with their terrible Greek fire, which, De Joinville says, looked like a fiery flying dragon, and destroyed the wooden defences, to make which the Crusaders had broken up their boats. The King's brother, the Comte d'Artois, was killed in a desperate struggle when fording the Nile. Worst of all, sickness was abroad in the camp, killing more than the swords of the Saracens. Louis himself was stricken, but refused to be removed to more comfortable quarters, with the reply of a true king, 'God helping me, I will suffer with my people.' He mounted his horse for a last desperate attack, the good knight Geoffroi de Sergines riding at his bridle-rein, and, as the King told De Joinville afterwards, cutting down the Saracens who attacked him as a good servant brushes away the flies that annoy his master.

When the King could no longer keep his saddle, the brave Geoffroi carried him into a house inhabited by a good burgher-woman from Paris, and there laid him on the ground with his head on her knee, hardly expecting that he would live to see another sunrise. And here, dying as it seemed, Louis was taken by the Saracens, and his soldiers, on the false report of an order from their leader, laid down their arms.

(Concluded on page 46.)