_The Young Knight's Vision_

In the far-off days of the last of the Crusades, a knight of Majorca,
in the Mediterranean Sea, stood on the shore of his island home gazing
over the water. Raymund Lull from the beach of Palma Bay, where he
had played as a boy, now looked out southward, where boats with their
tall, rakish, brown sails ran in from the Great Sea.

The knight was dreaming of Africa which lay away to the south of his
island. He had heard many strange stories from the sailors about the
life in the harbours of that mysterious African seaboard; but he had
never once in his thirty-six years set eyes upon one of its ports.

It was the year when Prince Edward of England, out on the mad, futile
adventure of the last Crusade, was felled by the poisoned dagger of an
assassin in Nazareth, and when Eleanor (we are told) drew the poison
from the wound with her own lips. Yet Raymund Lull, who was a knight
so skilled that he could flash his sword and set his lance in rest
with any of his peers, had not joined that Crusade. His brave father
carried the scars of a dozen battles against the Moors. Yet, when the
last Crusade swept down the Mediterranean, Lull stood aside; for he
was himself planning a new Crusade of a kind unlike any that had gone
before.

He dreamed of a Crusade not to the Holy Land but to Africa, where the
Crescent of Mohammed ruled and where the Cross of Christ was never
seen save when an arrogant Moslem drew a cross in the sand of the
desert to spit upon it. It was the desire of Raymund Lull's life to
sail out into those perilous ports and to face the fierce Saracens who