"
Then Little John and Will Scarlet and Allan a Dale ran leaping, full of
joy, to make themselves ready, while Robin also prepared himself for the
journey. After a while they all four came forth, and a right fair sight
they made, for Robin was clad in blue from head to foot, and Little John
and Will Scarlet in good Lincoln green, and as for Allan a Dale, he was
dressed in scarlet from the crown of his head to the toes of his pointed
shoes. Each man wore beneath his cap a little head covering of burnished
steel set with rivets of gold, and underneath his jerkin a coat of
linked mail, as fine as carded wool, yet so tough that no arrow could
pierce it. Then, seeing all were ready, young Partington mounted his
horse again, and the yeomen having shaken hands all around, the five
departed upon their way.
That night they took up their inn in Melton Mowbray, in Leicestershire,
and the next night they lodged at Kettering, in Northamptonshire; and
the next at Bedford Town; and the next at St. Albans, in Hertfordshire.
This place they left not long after the middle of the night, and
traveling fast through the tender dawning of the summer day, when the
dews lay shining on the meadows and faint mists hung in the dales, when
the birds sang their sweetest and the cobwebs beneath the hedges
glimmered like fairy cloth of silver, they came at last to the towers
and walls of famous London Town, while the morn was still young and all
golden toward the east.
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