small jewels and properties left by their own mother, while
everything else went to their brother.

There might have been some jealousy excited by the estimation in
which Stephen's efficiency--boy as he was--was evidently held by the
plain-spoken underlings of the verdurer; and this added to Mistress
Birkenholt's dislike to the presence of her husband's half-brothers,
whom she regarded as interlopers without a right to exist. Matters
were brought to a climax by old Spring's resentment at being roughly
teased by her spoilt children. He had done nothing worse than growl
and show his teeth, but the town-bred dame had taken alarm, and half
in terror, half in spite, had insisted on his instant execution,
since he was too old to be valuable. Stephen, who loved the dog
only less than he loved his brother Ambrose, had come to high words
with her; and the end of the altercation had been that she had
declared that she would suffer no great lubbers of the half-blood to
devour her children's inheritance, and teach them ill manners, and
that go they must, and that instantly. John had muttered a little
about "not so fast, dame," and "for very shame," but she had turned
on him, and rated him with a violence that demonstrated who was
ruler in the house, and took away all disposition to tarry long
under the new dynasty.

The boys possessed two uncles, one on each side of the house. Their
father's elder brother had been a man-at-arms, having preferred a
stirring life to the Forest, and had fought in the last surges of
the Wars of the Roses. Having become disabled and infirm, he had
taken advantage of a corrody, or right of maintenance, as being of
kin to a benefactor of Hyde Abbey at Winchester, to which Birkenholt
some generations back had presented a few roods of land, in right of