The Rock of the Lion

by Molly Elliot Seawell

At the park gates they were joined by the mounted yeomanry, and every parish they passed through sent its quota, until, when they reached the old minster city of York, they had a great cavalcade behind them. The venerable town was in holiday garb. The trainbands were out, with fife and drum; the sheriffs and lord-lieutenants of all three ridings were present in state; and the judges in their robes awaited the forming of the procession to the assize hall.

The life, the color, the masses of people who filled the picturesque streets of the beautiful old town, were captivating to Archy—but what amazed him most was to see a number of man-o'-warsmen about. He was not long in finding out that there was a large fleet at the mouth of the Humber, and these were liberty men who had come to York in wagons to spend their few hours of shore time.

But Archy was himself a sailor, and he began to consider that captains were not wont to allow men so far inland merely for a day's holiday, and the presence of several officers threw a flood of light on the question.

"They are press-gangs," he thought to himself. "The fleet, I have heard, is short-handed, and they have selected some of the trustiest fellows and sent them here with their officers, and many a stout countryman will sleep to-morrow night on one of his Majesty's ships."

But Archy soon became so taken up with the splendid pageant of opening the assizes that he forgot the sailors for the time. The highwayman and his accomplice, the coachman of the Comet, were to be tried at that term, but Archy soon found that the trial would not come off until the next day, and his testimony would not be wanted until then. All was grand and imposing until the prisoners were brought in, but the sight of so much misery and wickedness smote the boy to the heart, and he quickly left the favored position he occupied in the hall, and went out and walked about the streets.

The sitting of the Court was unusually prolonged, and the short December day was rapidly closing in before the procession was again formed, with something less of state, to return to the grand dinner served to the judges and all the great functionaries. In the evening there was to be a splendid assize ball, and while wretches were bemoaning the sentences of death or transportation they had received, and trembling prisoners waited in anguish the coming of their turn of trial, a splendid company assembled for the ball. But the same strange feeling of oppression still hung upon Archy. The sights he had seen were very brilliant, but there was something in the very word Assize that sobered him.

After dinner he slipped quietly away from Colonel Baskerville, and joining the crowd outside the noble building where the ball was to be held, watched the assembling of the guests. Among the last to come was his grandfather. Never had Lord Bellingham looked more superb than when he descended from his coach, bowing right and left to the cheering crowd. He was an unpopular man, a hard landlord, and overbearing to his equals—but he was noble to look at, and the unthinking crowd cheered him because of that.

Archy felt no inclination to enter the ballroom then, and wrapping his cloak around him, he sauntered away into the distant streets, now silent and deserted under the quiet stars.

He was thinking deeply and rather sadly—trying to imagine how his father had walked those streets twenty years before—recalling Langton, and pitying his grandfather's coming loneliness when both he and Colonel Baskerville left him—for he had made up his mind to go to London with Colonel Baskerville shortly, and to see what his prospects of exchange were. He wandered on and on, until he found himself in a remote corner of the town, opposite a quaint, old-fashioned inn, its spacious tap-room opening on a level with the street.