Dutch make dolls, of a stick and a poll thereon."

Pleased with hearing his own voice, he would have gone on with many
another thing; but seeing that Nick listened not at all to what he said,
he ceased, and rode on silently or chatting with the others.

The country through Middlesex was in most part flat, and heavy forests
overhung the road from time to time. There the players slipped their
poniards, and rode with rapier in hand; for many a dark deed and cruel
robbery had been done along this stretch of Watling street. And as they
passed, more than one dark-visaged rogue with branded hand and a price
upon his head peered at them from the copses by the way.

In places where the woods crept very near they pressed closer together
and rode rapidly; and the horse-boy and the grooms lit up the matches of
their pistolets, and laid their harquebuses ready in rest, and blew the
creeping sparkle snapping red at every turn; not so much really fearing
an attack upon so stout a party of reckless, dashing blades, as being
overawed by the great, mysterious silence of the forest, the
semi-twilight all about, and the cold, strange-smelling wind that fanned
their faces.

The wild spattering of hoofs in water-pools that lay unsucked by the sun
in shadowy stretches, the grim silence of the riders, and the wary eying
of each covert as they passed, sent a thrill of excitement into Nick's
heart too keen for any boy to resist.

Then, too, it was no everyday tale to be stolen away from home. It was a
wild, strange thing with a strange, wild sound to it, not altogether
terrible or unpleasant to a brave boy's ears in that wonder-filled age,
when all the world was turned adventurer, and England led the fore; when
Francis Drake and the "Golden Hind," John Hawkins and the "Victory,"
Frobisher and his cockleshells, were gossip for every English fireside;
when the whole world rang with English steel, and the wide sea foamed
with English keels, and the air was full of the blaze of the living and
the ghosts of the mighty dead. And down in Nick's plucky young English
heart there came a spark like that which burns in the soul of a mariner
when for the first time an unknown ocean rolls before his eyes.

So he rode on bravely, filled with a sense of daring and the thrill of
perils more remote than Master Carew's altogether too adjacent poniard,
as well as with a sturdy determination to escape at the first
opportunity, in spite of all the master-player