ers. An 'Ebrew Jew who worships
Mahound and is too bad for the Spanish folk themselves."

This rather startled Ambrose, though he knew enough to see that the
accusations could not both be true, but he forgot it in the delight,
when Will pronounced the work done, of drawing back the curtain and
feasting his eyes upon the black backs of the books, and the black-
letter brochures that lay by them. There were scarcely thirty, yet he
gloated on them as on an inexhaustible store, while Will, whistling
wonder at his taste, opined that since some one was there to look after
the stove, and the iron pot on it, he might go out and have a turn at
ball with Hob and Martin.

Ambrose was glad to be left to go over his coming feast. There was
Latin, English, and, alas! baffling Dutch. High or Low it was all the
same to him. What excited his curiosity most was the _Enchiridion
Militis Christiani_ of Erasmus--in Latin of course, and that he could
easily read--but almost equally exciting was a Greek and Latin
vocabulary; or again, a very thin book in which he recognised the New
Testament in the Vulgate. He had heard chapters of it read from the
graceful stone pulpit overhanging the refectory at Beaulieu, and, of
course, the Gospels and Epistles at mass, but they had been read with
little expression and no attention; and that Sunday's discourse had
filled him with eagerness to look farther; but the mere reading the
titles of the books was pleasure enough for the day, and his master was
at home before he had fixed his mind on anything. Perhaps this was as
well, for Lucas advised him what to begin with, and how to divide his
studies so as to gain a knowledge of the Greek, his great ambition, and
also to read the Scripture.

The master was almost as much delighted as the scholar, and it was not
till the curfew was beginning to sound that Ambrose could tear himself
away. It was still daylight, and the door of the next dwelling was
open. There, sitting on the ground cross-legged, in an attitude such as
Ambrose had never seen, was a magnificent old man, with a huge long
white beard, wearing, indeed, the usual dress of a Londoner of the lower
class, but the gown flowed round him in a grand and patriarchal manner,
corresponding with his noble, somewhat aquiline features; and behind him
Ambrose thought he caught a glimpse of the shy fawn he had seen in the
morning.

CHAPTER ELEVEN.

AY DI ME GRENADA.

"In sooth it was a thing