HELENA OF BRITAIN:

THE GIRL OF THE ESSEX FELLS.

[Afterward known as "St. Helena," the mother of Constantine.]
A.D. 255.

Ever since that far-off day in the infancy of the world, when
lands began to form and rivers to flow seaward, the little river
Colne has wound its crooked way through the fertile fields of
Essex eastward to the broad North Sea.

Through hill-land and through moor-land, past Moyns and Great
Yeldham, past Halstead and Chappel and the walls of Colchester,
turning now this way and now that until it comes to Mersea Island
and the sea, the little river flows to-day even as it sped along
one pleasant summer morning sixteen hundred and forty years ago,
when a little British princess, only fairly in her teens,
reclined in comfortable contentment in her gilded barge and
floated down the river from her father's palace at Colchester to
the strand at Wivanloe.

For this little girl of fourteen, Helena, the princess, was a
king's daughter, and, according to all accounts, a very bright
and charming girl besides--which all princesses have not been.
Her father was Coel, second prince of Britain and king of that
part of ancient England, which includes the present shires of