Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE LADY CLOTILDE.1 PAET I. The lady Clotilde was the heiress of Lyle; She owned its broad grass-lands for many a mile, For many a long reach of headland and bay, O'er valley and down to the hills far away. She was lord of the ‘ pays, ’ And had ‘ waifs’ and ‘ estrays, ’ And ‘flotsam’ and ‘jetsam, ’ as somebody say?, Which might really mean something perhaps in her days. And then she was pretty, And wickedly witty? There were people no doubt who thought that was a pity? But every one said through the length of these islesYou’d not meet such prime wheatland or see such 1 This tale was begun many years ago, in an attempt to imitate what is perhaps inimitable. arch smiles As the lady Clotilde’s, the fair heiress of Lyle’s. Now these were the days of romance that I write of, When your mere fortune-hunting was thought poorly quite of; So I need scarcely say That when every day Young gentlemen rode up to fair Castle Lyle, Arrayed at all points in the most reckless style, None thought of the wheatlands hut all of the smile; And when the great Countess of Knares wrote caressing, ‘ Her most gentle cousin, ’ so charmingly pressing The bright little maid to that stronghold again, ‘ Thy playmate, son Guy, will be home with us then.’ The good lady ne'er thought of her ample domain; Not she?nor young Vere, Nor the Sieur de Boremere, Nor Eustace, nor Scroope, nor Sir Marmaduke Grey, Who had lost his first wife, and was just getting grey, Nor any, indeed, but stout Hugh de Launay, Whose lands by the side of the fair Clotilde’s lay, And who always told truth in a very rude way. But there by the score At least, if not more, They kept flirting, and drinking, and sighing, and dressing, And singing, and tilting, and dining, and pressin