Excerpt from The Red Knight: A Romance When people who knew Robert Bryden in his Chelsea days as a quiet, unexpansive creature of slow reactions and an indifferent painter, heard of his adventure in Trinacria they found it difficult to believe that his nature was capable of such an extravagant flight; and in this one can hardly blame them, for the Bryden that they knew had adopted a kind of protective colouring for his enthusiasms that was so typically British as to conceal them altogether, and I don't suppose that one of his friends had any idea of his parentage, apart from a vague notion that he was connected in some way (as he was) with the firm of James Bryden Son, the Wine merchants, in Aldgate. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.