ents, usually kept in the iron box, were being used.

Marco went to the Tower of London and spent part of the day in living
again the stories which, centuries past, had been inclosed within its
massive and ancient stone walls. In this way, he had throughout
boyhood become intimate with people who to most boys seemed only the
unreal creatures who professed to be alive in school-books of history.
He had learned to know them as men and women because he had stood in
the palaces they had been born in and had played in as children, had
died in at the end. He had seen the dungeons they had been imprisoned
in, the blocks on which they had laid their heads, the battlements on
which they had fought to defend their fortressed towers, the thrones
they had sat upon, the crowns they had worn, and the jeweled scepters
they had held. He had stood before their portraits and had gazed
curiously at their "Robes of Investiture," sewn with tens of thousands
of seed-pearls. To look at a man's face and feel his pictured eyes
follow you as you move away from him, to see the strangely splendid
garments he once warmed with his living flesh, is to realize that
history is not a mere lesson in a school-book, but is a relation of the
life stories of men and women who saw strange and splendid days, and
sometimes suffered strange and terrible things.

There were only a few people who were being led about sight-seeing. The
man in the ancient Beef-eaters' costume, who was their guide, was
good-natured, and evidently fond of talking. He was a big and stout
man, with a large face and a small, merry eye. He was rather like
pictures of Henry the Eighth, himself, which Marco remembered having
seen. He was specially talkative when he stood by the tablet that
marks the spot where stood the block on which Lady Jane Grey had laid
her young head. One of the sightseers who knew little of English
history had asked some questions about the reasons for her execution.

"If her father-in-law, the Duke of Northumberland, had left that young
couple alone--her and her husband, Lord Guildford Dudley--they'd have
kept their heads on. He was bound to make her a queen, and Mary Tudor
was bound to be queen herself. The duke wasn't clever enough to manage
a conspiracy and work up the people. These Samavians we're reading
about in the papers would have done it better. And they're
half-savages."

"They had a big battle outside Melzarr yesterday," the sight-seer
st