Orders to the squires were generally transmitted through the bachelors,
and the head of that body was expected to make weekly reports of affairs
in their quarters to the chief captain of the body.

From this overlordship of the bachelors there had gradually risen a
system of fagging, such as is or was practised in the great English
public schools--enforced services exacted from the younger lads--which
at the time Myles came to Devlen had, in the five or six years it had
been in practice, grown to be an absolute though unwritten law of the
body--a law supported by all the prestige of long-continued usage. At
that time the bachelors numbered but thirteen, yet they exercised over
the rest of the sixty-four squires and pages a rule of iron, and were
taskmasters, hard, exacting, and oftentimes cruel.

The whole company of squires and pages was under the supreme command of
a certain one-eyed knight, by name Sir James Lee; a soldier seasoned by
the fire of a dozen battles, bearing a score of wounds won in fight and
tourney, and withered by hardship and labor to a leather-like toughness.
He had fought upon the King's side in all the late wars, and had at
Shrewsbury received a wound that unfitted him for active service, so
that now he was fallen to the post of Captain of Esquires at Devlen
Castle--a man disappointed in life, and with a temper imbittered by that
failure as well as by cankering pain.

Yet Perhaps no one could have been better fitted for the place he held
than Sir James Lee. The lads under his charge were a rude, rough, unruly
set, quick, like their elders, to quarrel, and to quarrel fiercely, even
to the drawing of sword or dagger. But there was a cold, iron sternness
about the grim old man that quelled them, as the trainer with a lash of
steel might quell a den of young wolves. The apartments in which he was