“Faith,” chuckled Barlowe, “here be some little eyasses practising a fantasy for the Queen’s pleasure.  Hey, lads, what’s all the pother about?"[2]

The company emerged half-shamefacedly from the shrubbery, a group of youngsters between ten and fourteen, in fanciful costumes of silk and brocade, or mimic armor and puffed doublets.  The central figure of the group was a handsome little lad in a sort of tunic of hairy undressed goatskin, a feather head-dress and gilded ornaments.  His dark face had a sullen look, and he grasped his lance as if about to use it.  Another urchin, whose great arched eyebrows, rolling eyes and impish mouth marked him as the clown of the company, made answer boldly,

“’T is Tom Poope, your lordships, who mislikes the dress he must wear, and says if we have but a king and queen of the monkeys to welcome the discoverers, the Queen will only laugh at us, and ’a will not stay to be laughed at.  ’T is a masque of the ventures of Captain Cabot, look you, and Tom’s the King of the salvages and makes all the long speeches.”

“Upon my word, coz,” laughed Armadas, “I think we have stumbled upon a pretty conceit intended to do honor to our master.  Methinks His Royal Highness here has the right on’t—­the man who made that costume never saw true Indians.”

“Have you seen them, then, sir?  Are you a voyager?” asked Tom Poope eagerly, his face brightening.  “And will you look on and tell us if we do it right?”

Barlowe grinned good-humoredly, and Armadas waved a laughing assent.  They seated themselves upon a grassy bank and the play began.

Before half a dozen speeches had been said it was quite clear that the dark-eyed child who played the Indian King was the heart and fire of the piece.  They were all clever children and well trained, but he alone lived his part.  His small figure moved with a grace and dignity that even his grotesque apparel could not spoil.  The costumer had evidently built his design for the costume of an Indian chief upon legends of wild men drawn from the history of Hanno and his gorillas, adding whatever absurdities he had gathered from sailors of the Gold Coast and the Caribbean Sea.  Armadas, who had made a voyage to Newfoundland and seen the stately figure of a sachem outlined against a sunset sky, thought that the boy’s instinct was truer than the costumer’s tradition.

“Let me arrange thy habit, lad,” he said when the first scene ended and the clown began his dance.  With a few deft touches, ripping down one side of the tunic and wreathing a girdle of ivy and bracken, he changed the whole outline of the figure.  With the hairy tunic draped as a cloak, and the ungainly plumed head-dress arranged as a warrior’s crest, the character which had been almost ridiculous became heroic, as the author of the masque evidently had intended.  The little King’s beautiful voice changed like the singing of a Cremona violin as he spoke his lines to the white stranger: