her gilded barge, had sighed for the days of the old-time British
valor and freedom, and, even as she looked off toward the
approaching triareme, she was wondering how she could awake to
thoughts of British glory her rather heavy-witted 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 propraetor 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 meet the necessary expenses of the new Emperor
Diocletian.