sort of dining-hall for jovial parties from the City; one of which
would seem to be on board this afternoon, to judge from the
flags which bedizen the masts, the sounds of revelry and savoury
steams which issue from those windows which once were port-
holes, and the rushing to and fro along the river brink, and across
that lucky bridge, of white-aproned waiters from the neighbour-
ing Pelican Inn. A great feast is evidently toward, for with
those white-aproned waiters are gay serving men, wearing on
their shoulders the City-badge. The Lord Mayor is giving a
dinner to certain gentlemen of the Leicester house party, who
are interested in foreign discoveries; and what place so fit for
such a feast as the Pelican itself?

Look at the men all round; a nobler company you will
seldom see. Especially too, if you be Americans, look at their
faces, and reverence them; for to them and to their wisdom you
owe the existence of your mighty fatherland.

At the head of the table sits the Lord Mayor; whom all
readers will recognise at once, for he is none other than that
famous Sir Edward Osborne, clothworker, and ancestor of the
Dukes of Leeds, whose romance now-a-days is in every one's
hands. He is aged, but not changed, since he leaped from the
window upon London Bridge into the roaring tide below, to
rescue the infant who is now his wife. The chivalry and
promptitude of the 'prentice boy have grown and hardened into
the thoughtful daring of the wealthy merchant adventurer.
There he sits, a right kingly man, with my lord Earl of Cum-
berland on his right hand, and Walter Raleigh on his left; the
three talk together in a low voice on the chance of there being
vast and rich countries still undiscovered between Florida and
the River of Canada. Raleigh's half-scientific declamation and
his often quotations of Doctor Dee the conjuror, have less
effect on Osborne than on Cumberland (who tried many an
adventure to foreign parts, and failed in all of them; apparently
for the simple reason that, instead of going himself, he sent
other people), and Raleigh is fain to call to his help the quiet
student who sits on his left hand, Richard Hakluyt, of Oxford.
But he is deep in talk with a reverend elder, whose long white
beard flows almost to his waist, and whose face is furrowed by
a thousand storms; Anthony Jenkinson by name, the great
Asiatic traveller, who is discoursing to the Christchurch vir-
tuoso of reindeer sledges and Siberian steppes, and of the
fossil ivory, plain proof of Noah's flood, which the Tungoos dig
from the ice-cliffs of the Arctic sea. Next to him is Christopher

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