A Boy's Ride

Purchase one of 1st World Library's Classic Books and help support our free internet library of downloadable eBooks. Visit us online at www.1stWorldLibrary.ORG - - It was the last of May in the north of England in the year 1209. A very different England from what any boy of to-day has seen. A chilly east wind was blowing. The trees of the vast forests were all in leaf but the ash trees and they were unfolding their buds. And along a bridle-path a few miles southwest of York a lad of fourteen was riding while behind him followed a handsome deerhound. A boy of fourteen at that age of the world was an older and more important personage than he is to-day. If he were well-born he had generally by this time served his time as a page and was become an esquire in the train of some noble lord. That this lad had not done so was because his uncle a prior in whose charge he had been reared since the early death of his parents had designed him for a priest. Priest however he had declined to be and his uncle had now permitted him to go forth unattended to attach himself as page to some lord if he could.