“They come now, for certain,” said Raleigh.  “Tressilian, that sound is grand.  We hear it from this distance as mariners, after a long voyage, hear, upon their night-watch, the tide rush upon some distant and unknown shore.”

“Mass!” answered Blount, “I hear it rather as I used to hear mine own kine lowing from the close of Wittenswestlowe.”

“He will assuredly graze presently,” said Raleigh to Tressilian; “his thought is all of fat oxen and fertile meadows.  He grows little better than one of his own beeves, and only becomes grand when he is provoked to pushing and goring.”

“We shall have him at that presently,” said Tressilian, “if you spare not your wit.”

“Tush, I care not,” answered Raleigh; “but thou too, Tressilian, hast turned a kind of owl, that flies only by night—­hast exchanged thy songs for screechings, and good company for an ivy-tod.”

“But what manner of animal art thou thyself, Raleigh,” said Tressilian, “that thou holdest us all so lightly?”

“Who—­I?” replied Raleigh.  “An eagle am I, that never will think of dull earth while there is a heaven to soar in, and a sun to gaze upon.”

“Well bragged, by Saint Barnaby!” said Blount; “but, good Master Eagle, beware the cage, and beware the fowler.  Many birds have flown as high that I have seen stuffed with straw and hung up to scare kites.—­But hark, what a dead silence hath fallen on them at once!”

“The procession pauses,” said Raleigh, “at the gate of the Chase, where a sibyl, one of the FATIDICAE, meets the Queen, to tell her fortune.  I saw the verses; there is little savour in them, and her Grace has been already crammed full with such poetical compliments.  She whispered to me, during the Recorder’s speech yonder, at Ford-mill, as she entered the liberties of Warwick, how she was ‘PERTAESA BARBARAE LOQUELAE.’”

“The Queen whispered to him!” said Blount, in a kind of soliloquy; “Good God, to what will this world come!”

His further meditations were interrupted by a shout of applause from the multitude, so tremendously vociferous that the country echoed for miles round.  The guards, thickly stationed upon the road by which the Queen was to advance, caught up the acclamation, which ran like wildfire to the Castle, and announced to all within that Queen Elizabeth had entered the Royal Chase of Kenilworth.  The whole music of the Castle sounded at once, and a round of artillery, with a salvo of small arms, was discharged from the battlements; but the noise of drums and trumpets, and even of the cannon themselves, was but faintly heard amidst the roaring and reiterated welcomes of the multitude.