"Why, then, for all this doughty strife and brave work shalt have another atop of it," the Prince said, his shrewd, shapely young face melting into a kindly softness. "Art a good lad to be thus sued for." He cast his swift glance about in instant search for some fit surname, and his eye caught the struggling taper-light upon the bough above him. "Thou shalt be Dickon of the Tannenbaum," he called out, so that each might hear, "and wear my boar's head in exchange for that other thou didst slay, and hold thyself my man." Then the torches moved on again, and behind them, in their dancing shadows through the wintry wood, the Prince and knights and litter passed; and Dickon followed to the highroad, where horses and five-score men-at-arms were waiting, and so to the abbey before ever midnight struck. Seven years afterward, on bloody Bosworth field, when King Richard hewed his despairing way through the ring of steel which engirdled the pretender Richmond, and fell there dead, another Richard rode hotly at his heels, and like him was stricken to the earth. But life was left in this second, and for the madness of his bravery it was spared. After he had lain a time in Leicester Abbey, to be cured of his wounds, he went to London, where Henry now was king instead. It was our Dickon. The aged Master Caxton and Andreas Mayer, his right hand now, stood Dickon's friends at court, and it came in time to pass that he died Sir Richard Tannibow, for so the English tongue framed the strange foreign word Tannenbaum. Of the properties he left behind the chief was the domain of Egswith, where once he had been the lowliest of hinds. In after ages the name of the family still further changed to Tambow; but it is not likely to undergo any further shortening. Though they do not hold Egswith now, and wear no title in these later times, the Tambows still bear upon their shield the fir tree and the candles, and rightfully hold their heads as high as any in all Shropshire. WHERE AVON INTO SEVERN FLOWS. CHAPTER I. HUGH THE WRITER. A boy of fifteen, clad in doublet and hose of plain cloth dyed a sober brown, sat alone at one end of a broad, vaulted room, before a writing table. The strong, clear light which covered him and his work fell through an open window, arched at the top and piercing a stone wall of almost a yard's thickness. Similar openings to the right and left of him marked with bars of light a dozen other places along the extended, shelf-like table, where writers had now finished their day's labor, and, departing, had left covered horns of ink and cleansed utensils behind them. But the boy's task lagged behind fulfilment, and mocked him.