Whilst this was passing above stairs, the venerable chief of the De Lancasters was sitting and conversing over his coffee with Colonel Wilson and his sons Henry and Edward; for the elder of these brothers, who was captain of a troop of dragoons, had taken advantage of a few days furlough to pay a visit to his father before he joined his regiment in Ireland. Henry was an amiable and well-informed young man, and had the character of being a very gallant and good officer. De Lancaster loved a soldier, and was fond of talking to every man upon professional topics: Henry was highly entertained with the singularity of his character, and had won the old gentleman’s heart by listening to his dissertations with the most flattering attention, asking questions and throwing in remarks occasionally, which proved him to have taken a lively interest in the subject under discussion, and to be a hearer to the heart’s content of his communicative host. Robert De Lancaster had been calling to mind the several passages, that occurred to him in the grammarians, respecting ancient tactics, and had gone back to the Trojan war for the purpose of remarking to Captain Henry, that it did not appear that the Greeks had any cavalry in the besieging army, except the horses, which they harnessed to their chariots: that even in the battle of Marathon there were no horse in the Athenian army, and that it was not till they repulsed Xerxes and were at peace, that they raised any body of cavalry, and then only three hundred. Henry let him proceed without interruption till he got amongst the Roman cohorts, who, he informed him, did not use saddles till they copied them from the Germans, and as for stirrups, they had no word, that answered to them in their language. He remarked that Franciscus Philelphus, who lived in the time of the fathers, had indeed coined the word _Stapeda_ to express a stirrup, but Budæus in after times had improved upon it by substituting the compound term of _Subex pedancus_, which he clearly preferred, and for which he gave Budæus all due credit.