father, Coel the King—an hereditary prince of that ancient Britain in which he was now, alas, but a tributary prince of the all too powerful Rome.
Now, "old King Cole," as Mother Goose tells us—for young Helena's father was none other than the veritable "old King Cole" of our nursery jingle—was a "jolly old soul," and a jolly old soul is very rarely an independent or ambitious one. So long as he could have "his pipe and his bowl"—not, of course, his long pipe of tobacco that all the Mother Goose artists insist upon giving him—but the reed pipe upon which his musicians played—so long, in other words, as he could live in ease and comfort, undisturbed in his enjoyment of the good things of life by his Roman over-lords, he cared for no change. Rome took the responsibility and he took things easily. But this very day, while his daughter Helena was floating down the river to meet him on the strand at Wivanloe, he was returning from an unsuccessful boar-hunt in the Essex woods, very much out of sorts—cross because he had not captured the big boar he had hoped to kill, cross because his favorite musicians had been "confiscated" by the Roman governor or proprætor at Londinium (as London was then called), and still more cross because he had that day received dispatches from Rome demanding a special and unexpected tax levy, or tribute, to
