Robert Buchanan, poet, novelist, and playwright, was born on
     Aug. 18, 1841, at Caverswall, Staffordshire, England, the son
     of a poor journeyman tailor from Ayrshire, in Scotland, who
     wrote poetry, and wandered about the country preaching
     socialism of the Owen type, afterwards editing a Glasgow
     journal.  Owing, perhaps, in part to his very unconventional
     training, Robert Buchanan entered on life with a strange
     freshness of vision.  Nothing in ordinary human life seemed
     common or mean to him, and this sense of wonder, combined with
     a power of judgment much steadier than his father’s, made him
     a poet of considerable genius.  “Undertones,” published in
     1863, and “Idylls and Legends of Inverburn,” which appeared
     two years later, made him famous.  The same qualities which he
     displayed in his poetry Buchanan exhibited in his earliest and
     best novels.  “The Shadow of the Sword,” published in 1876, was
     originally conceived as a poem, and it still remains one of
     the best of modern English prose romances.  In his latter years
     Robert Buchanan, tortured by the long and painful illness of
     his beautiful and gentle wife, wrote a considerable amount of
     work with no literary merit; but this does not diminish the
     value of his best and earliest work, which undoubtedly
     entitles him to a place of importance in English literature. 
     He died on June 10, 1901.

I.—­The King of the Conscripts

“Rohan Gwenfern!” cried the sergeant, in a voice that rang like a trumpet through the length of the town hall.

No one answered.  The crowd of young Kromlaix men looked at each other in consternation.  Was the handsomest, the strongest, and the most daring lad in their village a coward?  It was the dark year of 1813, when Napoleon was draining France of all its manhood.  Even the only sons of poor widowed women, such as Rohan Gwenfern was, were no longer exempted from conscription.  Having lost half a million men amid the snows of Russia, Napoleon had called for 200,000 more soldiers, and the little Breton fishing village of Kromlaix had to provide twenty-five recruits.

“Rohan Gwenfern!” cried the sergeant again.

The mayor rose up behind the ballot-box on the large table, about which the villagers were gathered, and looked around in vain for the splendid figure of the young fisherman.

“Where is your nephew?” he said to Corporal Derval, in an angry voice.

Derval, one of Napoleon’s veterans, who had been pensioned after losing his leg at Austerlitz, looked at his pretty niece, Marcelle, with a strange pallor on his furrowed, sunburnt face.

“Rohan was too ill to come,” said Marcelle, with a troubled look in her sweet grey eyes.  “I will draw in his name.”

“Very well, my pretty lass,” said the mayor, his grim face softening into a smile as he looked at the beautiful girl, “you shall draw for him, and bring him luck.”