IF the traveller does not know what to expect on approaching Waltham Cross, then the cross, standing in the centre of the road, must needs be a pleasant surprise to him, even though he presently discovers that they have done a great deal in recent times to spoil it; "they" meaning the usual pastors and masters, the furbishers and titivators of things ancient and worshipful, applying to such things their own little nostrums and programmes. But, woefully re-restored though it be, its crockets and pinnacles and panellings patched with a stone whose colour does not match with that of the old work, one can still find it possible to look upon it with reverence, for among the ancient wayside memorials of our storied land the beautiful Eleanor Crosses stand foremost, both for their artistic and their historic interest. More than any others, they hold the sentiment and the imagination of the wayfarer, and their architecture is more complex. The story that belongs to them is one long since taken to the warm hearts of the people, and cherished as among the most touching in all the history of the realm--a realm rich in stories of a peculiarly heart-compelling kind. It is that of Eleanor of Castile, Queen of Edward the First, who accompanied him to Palestine in 1270, on his Crusade against the Infidel. History tells how, on the evening of June 17, 1272, the King was seated alone and unarmed in a tent of the camp before Acre. It was his birthday, but birthdays find scant celebration in the tented field, and Edward on that day was engaged in the sterner business of receiving proposals of surrender from the besieged. He had given audience to a messenger from the Emir of Jaffa, who, having delivered the letter he had brought, stood waiting. Bending low, in answering a question the King had put to him, he suddenly put his hand to his belt, as though to produce other letters; but, instead, drew a poisoned dagger and struck at the King with it. Edward endeavoured to shield himself, but received a deep wound in the arm; then, as the man endeavoured to strike again, giving him a kick that felled him to the ground, he wrenched away the would-be assassin's dagger and plunged it into his body. When the King's attendants came rushing in, the man was dead. Fortunate for him it was that he died so simply, for the imaginations of those who dispensed the rough justice of the time were sufficiently fertile to have devised many novel and exquisitely painful variations of torture for such an one. The King's wound was serious, and although all the drugs and balsams in the limited pharmacopoeia of those times were administered, it grew worse. Then it was, according to the pretty story universally received, that the Queen, finding the efforts of physicians vain, sucked the poison from the wounded arm of her lord to such good purpose that he recovered, and sat his charger again within fifteen days.