Helmeted, and sword in hand, with a host of stalwart men-at-arms at their back, they called on John at Runnymede. It was not a friendly call. There was too much iron present for that. Iron glove meant iron hand that day, and John Lackland knew it. Sternly those assembled barons told him that the time for smooth words was past. "The divine right" of kings had been held up to the broad light of a modern day, and found to be motheaten by time. Its fabric was thin as cobweb, and there was nothing "divine" about it; nothing but the plain fact that "king's right" was merely the might of the strong, not the right of the just, and if it must come to that, they were muscular Christians too, and could behead a man as well as another. So then and there they laid before him a written agreement or "charter," as they called it, and told him to place at the end of it the written signature of the king, which would thus make it the law of the land. It was a bitter moment for that sullen king. He would have refused to sign it had he dared. But there, to right and left of him, scowled the menacing faces of the fiercest fighters in all England. Crusader waved his hand to Crusader across the hall, and in that greeting the low clash of steel rippled through the ranks. To refuse that signature meant--not the death of his friends, his comrades, his helpers in doing evil. That result not greatly would have troubled him. No! It meant what to him was a more serious matter. It was his own life now which he must buy by his signature, or die. He was not ready for that, so John Lackland of England signed the charter. What a great thing for England and the world it was! for among other things the agreement read that "NO FREEMAN SHALL BE IMPRISONED OR PUT TO DEATH, OR HAVE HIS PROPERTY TAKEN FROM HIM, BUT BY THE JUDGMENT OF HIS PEERS (his equals) OR BY THE LAW OF THE LAND!" And now, seven hundred years later, if it is claimed that a man does wrong and breaks the law he is arrested and brought before a judge. But before that judge can sentence him to death or long imprisonment the whole story is told before twelve men, called a jury, who decide whether he deserves punishment or not. And this is the great gift handed down to us by those barons of old from the days when, if he wished a person's death, it was enough for a king to say, "I do not like that man!" To this day we speak of that agreement as "the great charter;" or more often, we use the words of the Latin language in which it was written (since all learned men then, whether Saxon, Norman, French or Dane, could read and understand that common tongue) words which mean the same, and we call it "MAGNA CHARTA." SPARK XII. AND HOW IT WENT HALF ROUND THE EARTH, YET CROSSED AGAIN AT LAST THE TRAIL OF LEIF ERICSSON.