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sport, and slain their thousands and tens of thousands; but now man had
become a creature of price; the life of one of them was of more worth than
the so called treasures of kings. Look at his thought-endued countenance,
his graceful limbs, his majestic brow, his wondrous mechanism--the type
and model of this best work of God is not to be cast aside as a broken
vessel--he shall be preserved, and his children and his children's
children carry down the name and form of man to latest time.
Above all I must guard those entrusted by nature and fate to my especial
care. And surely, if among all my fellow-creatures I were to select those
who might stand forth examples of the greatness and goodness of man, I
could choose no other than those allied to me by the most sacred ties. Some
from among the family of man must survive, and these should be among the
survivors; that should be my task--to accomplish it my own life were a
small sacrifice. There then in that castle--in Windsor Castle,
birth-place of Idris and my babes, should be the haven and retreat for the
wrecked bark of human society. Its forest should be our world--its garden
afford us food; within its walls I would establish the shaken throne of
health. I was an outcast and a vagabond, when Adrian gently threw over me
the silver net of love and civilization, and linked me inextricably to
human charities and human excellence. I was one, who, though an aspirant
after good, and an ardent lover of wisdom, was yet unenrolled in any list
of worth, when Idris, the princely born, who was herself the
personification of all that was divine in woman, she who walked the earth
like a poet's dream, as a carved goddess endued with sense, or pictured
saint stepping from the canvas--she, the most worthy, chose me, and gave
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