effeminate creatures, but he found 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 VII. 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.