whom the Master of Game made three curtsies, and then on
his knees proclaimed the desire of his heart to serve the mighty Prince
Pallaphilos.

Having risen from his kneeling posture Kit Hatton blew his horn, and at
the signal his huntsman entered the room, bringing with him a fox, a
cat, and ten couples of hounds. Forthwith the fox was released from the
pole to which it was bound; and when the luckless creature had crept
into a corner under one of the tables, the ten couples of hounds were
sent in pursuit. It is a fact that English gentlemen in the sixteenth
century thus amused themselves with a fox-hunt in a densely crowded
dining-room. Over tables and under tables, up the hall and down the
hall, those score hounds went at full cry after a miserable fox, which
they eventually ran into and killed in the cinder-pit, or as Dugdale
expresses it, "beneath the fire." That work achieved, the cat was turned
off, and the hounds sent after her, with much blowing of horns, much
cracking of whips, and deafening cries of excitement from the gownsmen,
who tumbled over one another in their eagerness to be in at the death.

CHAPTER XXX.

THE RIVER AND THE STRAND BY TORCHLIGHT.

Scarcely less out of place in the dining-hall than Kit Hatton's hounds,
was the mule fairly mounted on which the Prince Pallaphilos made his
appearance at the High Table after supper, when he notified to his
subjects in what manner they were to disport themselves till bedtime.
Thus also when the Prince of Purpoole kept his court at Gray's Inn, A.D.
1594, the prince's champion rode into the dining-hall upon the back of a
fiery charger which, like the rider, was clothed in a panoply of steel.

In costliness and riotous excess the Prince of Purpoole's revel at
Gray's Inn was not inferior to any similar festivity in the time of
Elizabeth. On the 20th of December, St. Thomas's Eve, the Prince (one
Master Henry Holmes, a Norfolk gentleman) took up his quarters in the
Great Hall of the Inn, and by the 3rd day of January the grandeur and
comicality of his proceedings had created so much talk throughout the
town that the Lord Treasurer Burghley, the Earls of Cumberland, Essex,
Shrewsbury and Westmoreland, the Lords Buckhurst, Windsor, Sheffield,
Compton, and a magnificent array of knights and ladies visited Gray's
Inn Hall on that day and saw the masque which the revellers put upon the
stage. After the masque there was a banquet, which was followed by a
bal