Page:Lives of Fair and Gallant Ladies Volume II.djvu/86

Rh worn out by dint of shooting all through the long and terrible siege, and for the same cause no longer being able to provide them with hemp, or flax, or silk, or aught else wherewithal to make bow-strings, did resolve to cut off their lovely tresses and fair, yellow locks, not sparing this beauteous honour of their heads and chief adornment of their beauty. Nay! with their own fair hands, so white and delicate, they did twist and wind the same and make it into bow-strings to supply the men of war. And I leave you to imagine with what high courage and mettle these would now stretch and bend their bows, shoot their arrows and fight the foe, bearing as they did such fine favours of the ladies.

We read in the History of Naples how that great Captain Sforza, serving under the orders of Queen Jeanne II., having been taken prisoner by the Queen's husband, James, and set in strict confinement and having some taste of the strappado, would without a doubt ere much longer have had his head cut off, but that his sister did fly to arms and straight take the field. She made so good a fight, she in her own person, as that she did capture four of the chiefest Neapolitan gentlemen, and this done, sent to tell the King that whatsoever treatment he should deal to her brother, the same would she meet out to his friends. The end was, he was constrained to make peace and deliver him up safe and sound. Ah! brave and gallant-hearted sister, rising so superior to her sex's weakness!

I do know of certain sisters and kinswomen, who if but they had dared a like deed, some while agone, might mayhap have saved alive a gallant brother of theirs, which