y case grappled me.
Fifteen years before, I had left Appleby Hundred and my native province
as well befriended as the son of Roger Ireton was sure to be. And now--

"Dick, my lad, I am like to fight alone," said I.

He swore again at that; and here, lest I should draw my loyal Richard as
he was not, let me say, once for all, that his oaths were but the
outgushings of a warm and impulsive heart, rarely bitter, and never, as
I believe, backed by surly rancor or conscious irreverence.

"That you shall not, Jack," he asserted, stoutly. "I must be a-gallop
now to tell this king's captain to look elsewhere for his next friend;
but to-morrow morning I'll meet you in the road between this and the
Stair outlands, and we'll fare on together."

After this he would brook no more delay; and when Tomas had fetched his
horse I saw him mount and ride away under the low-hanging
maples--watched him fairly out of sight in the green and gold twilight
of the great forest before turning back to my lonely hearth and its
somber reminders.

I stirred the dying embers, throwing on a pine knot for better light.
Then I took down my father's sword from its deer-horn brackets over the
chimney-piece, and set myself to fine its edge and point with a bit of
Scotch whinstone. It was a good blade; a true old Andrea Ferara got in
battle in the seventeenth century by one of the Nottingham Iretons.

I whetted it well and carefully. It was not that I feared my enemy's
strength of wrist or tricks of fence; but fighting had been my trade,
and he is but a poor craftsman who looks not well to see that his tools
are in order against their time of using.

II

WHICH KNITS UP SOME BROKEN ENDS

It was in the autumn of the year '64, as I was coming of age, that my
father made ready to send me to England. Himself a conscience exile from
Episcopal Virginia, and a descendant of those Nottingham Iretons whose
best-known son fought stoutly against Church and King under Oliver
Cromwell, he was yet willing to humor my bent and to use the interest of
my mother's family to enter me in the king's service.

Accordingly, I took ship at Norfolk for "home," as we called it in those
days; and, after a stormy passage and overmuch waiting as my cousins'
guest in Lincolnshire, had my pair of colors in the Scots Blues, lately
home from garrison duty in the Canadas.

Of the life in barracks of a young ensign with little wit and less
wisdom, and with more guineas in h