ound that these youths preparing for the trained
bands understood all sorts of martial exercises far better than any of
his forest acquaintance, save perhaps the hitting of a mark. He was
half wild with a boy's enthusiasm for Kit Smallbones and Edmund Burgess,
and when, after eating the supper that had been reserved for the late
comers, he and his brother repaired to their own chamber, his tongue ran
on in description of the feats he had witnessed and his hopes of
emulating them, since he understood that Archbishop as was my Lord of
York, there was a tilt-yard at York House. Ambrose, equally full of his
new feelings, essayed to make his brother a sharer in them, but Stephen
entirely failed to understand more than that his book-worm brother had
heard something that delighted him in his own line of scholarship, from
which Stephen had happily escaped a year ago!

CHAPTER SEVEN.

YORK HOUSE.

"Then hath he servants five or six score,
Some behind and some before
A marvellous great company
Of which are lords and gentlemen,
With many grooms and yeomen
And also knaves among them."
_Contemporary Poem on Wolsey_.

Early were hammers ringing on anvils in the Dragon Court, and all was
activity. Master Headley was giving his orders to Kit Smallbones before
setting forth to take the Duke of Buckingham's commands; Giles Headley,
very much disgusted, was being invested with a leathern apron, and
entrusted to Edmund Burgess to learn those primary arts of furbishing
which, but for his mother's vanity and his father's weakness, he would
have practised four years sooner. Tibble Steelman was superintending
the arrangement of half a dozen corslets, which were to be carried by
three stout porters, under his guidance, to what is now Whitehall, then
the residence of the Archbishop of York, the king's prime adviser,
Thomas Wolsey.

"Look you, Tib," said the kind-hearted armourer, "if those lads find not
their kinsman, or find him not what they look for, bring them back
hither, I cannot have them cast adrift. They are good and brave youths,
and I owe a life to them."

Tibble nodded entire assent, but when the boys appeared in their
mourning suits, with their bundles on their backs, they were sent back
again to put on their forest green, Master Headley explaining that it
was reckoned ill-omened, if not insulting, to appear before any great
personage in black, unless to enhance some petition directly addressed
to h