ower. The season was spring, and the year 1395. Within the house,
though it was barely seven o'clock in the morning, all was bustle and
confusion, for Dame Lovell was superintending her handmaidens in the
preparation of dinner. A buxom woman was Dame Lovell, neither tall nor
short, but decidedly stout, with a round, good-natured face, which just
then glowed and burned under the influence of the fire roaring on the
large grateless hearth. She wore a black dress, heavily trimmed at the
bottom with fur, and she carried on her head one of those remarkable
elevations generally known as the Syrian or conical head-dress, made of
black stiffened gauze, and spangled with golden stars. Her assistants,
mostly girls of from sixteen to twenty-five years of age, were occupied
in various parts of the kitchen; while Mistress Katherine, a
staid-looking woman of middle age, who filled a post somewhat similar to
the modern one of housekeeper, was employed at a side table in mixing
some particularly elaborate compound. Among this busy throng moved Dame
Lovell, now giving a stir to a pot, and now peeping into a pan, boxing
the ears of any maiden who appeared remiss in her duty, and generally
keeping up a strict and active supervision.

"Nan, thy leeks be not hewn small enough. Cicely, look to the pottage,
that it boil not over. Al'ce, thou idle jade!"--with a sound box on the
ear,--"thou hast left out the onions in thy blanch-porre! Margery!
Madge! Why, Madge, I say! Where is Mistress Margery, maidens? Joan,
lass, hie thee up, and see whether Mistress Margery be not in the
chamber."

Joan, a diminutive girl of sixteen, quitted the parsley she was
chopping, and ran lithely out of the room, to which she soon returned,
and, dropping a courtesy, announced that "Mistress Margery was in her
chamber, and was coming presently,"--which latter word, in the year
1395, meant not "by and by," as it now does, but "at present." Mistress
Margery verified the assertion of Joan by following her into the kitchen
almost immediately. And since Mistress Margery is to play the important
part of heroine, it may be well to devote a few words to her person and
costume. She is the only child of Sir Geoffrey Lovell, Knight, and Dame
Agnes Lovell, and is now seventeen years of age; rather under the middle
height, slenderly formed, with an appearance of great fragility and
delicacy; her complexion is very fair, of that extreme fairness which
often betoke