the fertile fields of Essex eastward to
the broad North Sea.

Through hill-land and through moor-land, past Moyns and Great Yeldham,
past Halstead and Chappel and the walls of Colchester, turning now this
way and now that until it comes to Mersea Island and the sea, the little
river flows to-day even as it sped along one pleasant summer morning
sixteen hundred and forty years ago, when a little British princess,
only fairly in her teens, reclined in comfortable contentment in her
gilded barge and floated down the river from her father's palace at
Colchester to the strand at Wivanloe.

For this little girl of fourteen, Helena, the princess, was a king's
daughter, and, according to all accounts, a very bright and charming
girl besides--which all princesses have not been. Her father was Coel,
second prince of Britain and king of that part of ancient England, which
includes the present shires of Essex and of Suffolk, about the river
Colne.

Not a very large kingdom this, but even as small as it was, King Coel
did not hold it in undisputed sway. For he was one of the tributary
princes of Britain, in the days when Roman arms, and Roman law, and
Roman dress, and Roman manners, had place and power throughout England,
from the Isle of Wight, to the Northern highlands, behind whose
forest-crowned hills those savage natives known as the Picts--"the
tattooed folk"--held possession of ancient Scotland, and defied the
eagles of Rome.

The monotonous song of the rowers, keeping time with each dip of the
broad-bladed oars, rose and fell in answer to the beats of the master's
silver baton, and Helena too followed the measure with the tap, tap, of
her sandaled foot.

Suddenly there shot out around one of the frequent turns in the river,
the gleam of other oars, the high prow of a larger galley, and across
the water came the oar-song of a larger company of rowers. Helena
started to her feet.

"Look, Cleon," she cried, pointing, eagerly towards the approaching
boat, "'t is my father's own trireme. Why this haste to return, think'st
thou?"

"I cannot tell, little mistress," replied the freedman Cleon, her
galley-master; "the king thy father must have urgent tidings, to make
him return thus quickly to Camalodunum."

Both the girl and the galley-master spoke in Latin, for the language of
the Empire was the language of those in authority or in official life
even in its remotest provinces, and the galley-master did but use the
name