A boy of fifteen, clad in doublet and hose of plain cloth dyed a sober brown, sat alone at one end of a broad, vaulted room, before a writing table. The strong, clear light which covered him and his work fell through an open window, arched at the top and piercing a stone wall of almost a yard\'s thickness. Similar openings to the right and left of him marked with bars of light a dozen other places along the extended, shelf-like table, where writers had now finished their day\'s labor, and, departing, had left covered horns of ink and cleansed utensils behind them. But the boy\'s task lagged behind fulfilment, and mocked him.

Strive as he might, Hugh could not compel the tails of the longer letters to curl freely and with decent grace, or even to run in the same direction, one with the other. Though he pressed his elbow to the board, and scowled intently at the vellum before him, and even thrust out his tongue a little in earnest endeavor, still the marks went wrong. At last there came at the end of a word an "f," which needs must flow into shapely curves at top and bottom, if all fair writing were not to be shamed—and, lo! it did neither, but sloped off shakily into a rude angle above, a clumsy duck\'s egg below. Then he laid down his reed pen, and groaned aloud.

This Hugh Overtown, having later come to man\'s estate and then comfortably ripened into old age, has been dust and ashes now close upon four hundred years. For every minute in that huge stretch of time, some other boy since then has put aside his pen and groaned, because the stubborn letters would not come right. But not many of these have had such sound cause for vexation.

First of all, Hugh was a trained writer, who might look a little later to be actually paid for his toil, if so be he did not take the black habit and became a monk himself. All of their gentle craft that the master limners and letterers in this great scriptorium of Tewkesbury Abbey could teach him, he had learned. In all the ten major abbeys and priories of Gloucestershire, perhaps no other lad of his years was so skilled to use both brush and pen. His term of tutelage being passed, he wrought now, in repayment for his teaching, upon the choicest of the volumes written here for great nobles and patrons of art and letters. And if ever sureness of glance and touch was called for, it was at this present time, since the work must be meet for royal eyes. The volume—when all its soft, creamy leaves should have been covered with arabesques and high painted crests and shields and deftly regular text of writing, and been sewed together inside their embossed covers—was to be given, they said now, to the brother of the King. Prouder ambition than this a craftsman could hardly dream of—yet now, all at once, Hugh despaired to find himself making foolish mis-marks on the precious page, and not able to contrive their betterment.

The boy stared in gloom upon the parchment, wondering if, in truth, it were wholly spoilt; then his eyes wandered off through the open window to the blue May sky, and drifting after their gaze went his thoughts, in wistful reverie upon that gilded dreamland of princes and earls, whither this book, in good time, was to wend its way. New promptings stirred in his blood.

He had been a monk\'s boy in all these later years of peace, since his father, the poor saddler, fell in his Nevill livery on Hedgely Moor, away in the farthest north. The great kindly Abbey had been much more his home than the dark, squalid little house in the village below, where his widowed mother lived: here he had learned to write so that even the Abbot, John Strensham, lofty magnate and companion of princes though he was, had nodded smilingly over his work; here he had helped to serve the Mass in the grand Abbey church, with censer and bell, and felt his young mind enriched and uplifted by pious longings; here, too, he had dreamed into the likeness of veritable and detailed history his vision of the time when he should compose some wonderful chronicle, and win thanks from the great ones of the earth, and be known to all men as Hugh of Tewkesbury, whose book was to be prized above every other.

But now, after seven years wherein peaceful desires possessed plain men—lo! here was fighting in the land. And now of a sudden it seemed to Hugh that the writing of books, the quiet cloistral life, even the favor of the Abbot himself, were paltry things. An unaccustomed heat tingled in his veins at thought of what existence outside these thick walls might now once more signify. Who would be a stoop-shouldered scribe, a monk, or even a mass-priest when there were war harnesses to wear, horses to mount, yew bows to bend till the shaft trembled in the strain?

Hugh could almost believe that he heard the tramp and distant confused murmuring of an armed host, as his musing dream took form. The very pages lying before him spoke of this new outburst of war, and linked him to it. The book was one of heraldry, and it had been begun for the great Earl of Warwick. Both the fame and the person of this mighty captain were well-known to the lad, for the King-maker was lord of Tewkesbury, and the overshadowing patron of village and abbey alike. But when scarcely the first sheets had been written this puissant lord had fled the kingdom, and the cautious monks had laid the work aside. Later came strange rumors and tales: how Warwick had returned and driven the King away, and put up his whilom Red-rose foes to rule in London—and then pens and brushes were set busily at the book once more. But now the King had in turn come back and seized his own again, and slain Warwick on bloody Barnet field—and the frightened monks had bethought them to finish the book, with sundry emblazonings of the royal arms now ingeniously married to those of the Nevills, and make it a peace offering to Duke George of Clarence, who had wedded Warwick\'s daughter, and would be lord of Tewkesbury in his shoes.

The half-written page of vellum on the table seemed to Hugh a living part of all this stirring new romance of blood and spark-striking steel. Almost it made a soldier out of him to touch it. The characters engrossed thereon by his own hand danced before his eyes—waved in his daydream like the motto on some proud knight\'s banner being borne forward to battle.

Suddenly the boy sat upright. Beyond question there was an unwonted noise, as of tumult, coming through the casement from the village without. He could distinguish the clanking of iron harness and weapons, the trampling of hoofs; and now—once! twice! a trumpet blast, rising on the air above the dull, vague rumble which bespeaks the assembling of a throng. He sprang to his feet, with the thought to climb the embrasure and look forth—and then as swiftly sat down again and bent over his work; the Chief Scrivener of the Abbey had entered the chamber.

Brother Thomas came slowly to the table—a good, easy man, whose fat white fingers knew knife and spoon now in these latter days much oftener than brush or pen—and glanced idly over Hugh\'s shoulder at the pages. Then he lifted the unfinished one, held it in the light to peer more closely, and sniffed aloud. Next he put his hand under Hugh\'s chin, and raised the boy\'s blushing face up till their glances met.

"What palsied spiders\'-tracks are these?" he asked, holding out the vellum. "Art ill, boy?"

The gentle irony in his master\'s tone touched Hugh\'s conscience. He shook his head, and hung it, and kept a sheepish silence.

Thomas tossed the sheet upon the table, and spoke with something more of sharpness. "It is the mummers that have led thy wits off morris-dancing," he said. "These May-day fooleries stretch themselves out now, each year more, until no time at all is left for honest work. This it is I noted in thee yesterday, and marvelled at—when thou hadst ruled the lines bordering the painted initial letter with effect to cut off holy St. Adhelm\'s ear. Thy head is filled with idle sports and frolics outside. Happen his Lordship shall put them down now, once for all!"

Hugh\'s red face turned redder still, and when he would have spoken, his tongue was tied in confusion. Brother Thomas had unwittingly drawn very near to the truth of an awkward thing, the burden of which lay heavily on the boy\'s mind. In the next room, hidden but indifferently, were the fanciful garments which he himself had painted for the village morris-dancers a month before. They had been returned in privacy to him, and he had weakly pledged himself to trick them out anew against their coming use at Whitsuntide. This guilty secret it was that had preyed upon his peace, and robbed his hand of its cunning, ever since the masking dresses had been brought to him on yester-morning.

In any other year, he might have spoken freely to his master of this matter. But as evil chance would have it, on this very May festival, now two days gone—when in their pleasant wont the youths and maidens of Tewkesbury rose before cockcrow, and hied them to the greenwood with music and the blowing of horns, to gather haythorn branches and dell-flowers, to bathe their faces in the May-dew for beauty\'s sake, to shoot at target with Robin Hood, and dance their fill about Maid Marian—who but Brother Thomas should pass on his return from matins at Deerhurst cell, nodding drowsily with each movement of his patient mule? Hugh recalled with a shudder how some wanton ne\'er-do-well had from the bushes hurled a huge, soft swollen toadstool, which broke upon the good monk\'s astonished countenance, and scattered miserably inside his hood. It was small wonder that from this Brother Thomas conceived sour opinions of May-day sports, and now hinted darkly that the Abbot should make an end to them. But as it stood thus, Hugh dared not speak concerning the morris-dresses, and so had hidden them, and now was sorely troubled about it all.

It may be that here, upon the moment, he would have broken silence with his secret, well knowing how truly gentle a heart had Thomas. But at this the door was flung open, and there entered Brother Peter, his gaunt gray poll shaking with excitement, his claw-like hands held up as one amazed, his eyes aflame with eagerness.

"Know ye what is come upon us?" he called out breathlessly. "The foreign woman—save her Grace, she that was—or is—Queen Margaret, I mean—is at our gates, and with her the Lord Duke Somerset, and her son the Prince Edward, and the great Earl\'s daughter, our Lady Anne, and with them a mort of lords, and knights, and men-at-arms—running now over every highway and lane inside Tewkesbury and out, taking to themselves roughly whatever eye likes or belly craves—swearing by the Rood they will have the Abbey down about our ears if we deny them or food or drink!"

While Peter\'s vehement tongue hurled forth these tidings, the man Thomas went pale with sudden concern for the great treasures and peace of the house; the boy Hugh rose to his feet, all the miseries of May-day and morris-garments clean forgotten, and only the inspiriting ring of steel on steel in his ears.

"Oh! may I run and behold the brave sight?" he prayed aloud, but Thomas held forth a restraining hand for the moment, and Hugh, much chafing, heard what further Peter had to tell.

The Abbot, and with him the heads of the Chapter, had gone to the gates, and by parley had warded off incursion. The Abbey servants, threescore in number, were bearing forth meat and bread and ale to spread on the ham by the mill for the famished Lancastrians, who had in these thirty hours marched from Bristol by Gloucester, through forest and foul by-ways, with scarcely bite or sup, and now ravened like winter wolves. There were stories that King Edward, in pursuit, had covered ground even more swiftly, and now was this side of Cheltenham, in hot chase. With this dread foe at their tail, the Lancastrian lords dared not attempt to ford the Severn, and so Queen, Prince, Duke, and all were halted up above the village on the high Gaston fields, and there would on the morrow give battle to King Edward.

"Oh! woe the day!" groaned Thomas, whose heart was in peaceful things. "How shall we escape sack and pillage—our painted missals and fair written tomes, our jewelled images, our plate of parcel-gilt, and silver-gilt and white, the beryl candlesticks, the mitres, monstrances, rings, gloves—wist ye not how after Wakefield\'s victory the Queen\'s men broke open churches, and defiled altars, from York along to London town?"

"Hast but a poor stomach for war times, good Thomas!" said the lean and eager old Brother Sacristan, in a tone spiced with sneering. "Who talketh of Wakefield? Who hath promised victory to these ribald Devon louts? On the morrow, we shall see them cast off their coats to run the better. Our stout King Edward hath never lost fight or turned tail yet. Shall he begin now?"

The old monk had not forgotten the deep Yorkist devotion in which his hotter secular youth had been trained, and his eyes sparkled now at thought of how true a fighter King Edward really was. No such fire of remembrance burned within Thomas, who none the less accepted the proffered consolation.

"Of a certainty," he admitted, "the King hath won all his battles heretofore. Doubtless he hath the close favor of the saints. I mind me now of his piety—how that he would not be crowned on the day appointed, for that it was Childermas, and the Holy Innocents might not be thus affronted. Thus do wise and pious kings and men"—Thomas lifted his voice here, and glanced meaningly at Hugh—"win Heaven\'s smiles, and honor fitly the anniversaries of the year—not by dancing and mumming in the greenwood."

"I ween that in this game now forward, hard knocks will serve King Edward more than all his holiness, good Thomas," said Peter, who, coming to the Abbey late in life, brought some carnal wisdom along in his skull. "And this more—mark thou my words—when all is still again the Abbey will be the richer, not the poorer, for it all."

"How wilt thou make that good?" asked Thomas. "At best, this beef and ale must be at our cost—and the worst may more easily come to pass."

"Hast forgotten the funerals?" said Peter, dryly, with a significant nod towards the door beyond. Then, noting no gleam of comprehension on the faces of the others, he strode to this door, and threw it open. Within, in the half light, they could see through the narrow archway the dim outlines of ri............