s a pleasure to
see his Majesty in the streets of London, with the grand lords and
ladies all in their silks and satins, and jewels and feathers. It will
be long, I am afraid," sighed the good woman, "before we shall see
such fine sights in these woods."

"Hush, goody," said Sam, "take care your tongue do not get you into
trouble. Speak lower, an you will talk about things you know nothing
about. You love kings and lords better than some folk," he concluded,
with a laugh.

"Take care of your own tongue, Sam Bars; I warrant you mine will take
care of itself. But wherefore should I not love the king? Is it not
written--touch not mine anointed, and do my prophets no harm? And I
will let you know, Sam Bars? that I will say what I please about him,
God bless him! Marry, come up, a fine time of day truly, if a woman
may not speak her mind! I should like to see the man or woman either,
forsooth, to stop me. My tongue and ten commandments (stretching out
her fingers) know how to take care of one another, I can tell you. My
tongue get me into trouble! O, Sam, why do you aggravate me so? Me,
the quietest and peaceablest and silentest wife in the world! Why dost
not speak? Art as dumb as the bench your heavy carcass almost breaks
down? Speak, I say, Sam, speak, or I shall go crazy."

But her husband, whom long experience had taught the best mode of
weathering such storms, only shook his head in silence, until the good
woman, after a variety of ejaculations and expletives, finding that
she made no more impression on him than children's pop-guns on a
sand-bank, concluded to cool down, when she asked what the Governor
said to him.

Sam, glad that the current had taken another direction, answered
readily "a mountain of questions about Philip. And he wanted to know
why I put so many irons on him--how he found it out, the Lord only
knows, unless"--here Bars sunk his voice, so that the words were
inaudible to the listener, and he lost a sentence or two--"and when he
dismissed me, he ordered that I should never do it again without his
consent, and then sent me into the kitchen, where I had a pottle of
sack."

"A whole pottle of sack!" exclaimed his wife, in a tone of
disappointment; "and here was I at home, as dry in this outlandish hot
weather as the children of Israel at Rephidim, when they did chide
Moses because there was no water to drink." "You might have brought
your own Margery a taste," she added, reproachfully.

"Did I