made
response, seemed like a bright picture framed by the door, and set
off by the stable's blackness. The whole formed such a contrast to
themselves, as they lay wallowing, like some obscene animals, in their
squalor and wickedness on the two heaps of straw, that for a few moments
they looked on without speaking, and felt almost ashamed.

'Ah!'said Hugh at length, carrying it off with a laugh: 'He's a rare
fellow is Barnaby, and can do more, with less rest, or meat, or drink,
than any of us. As to his soldiering, I put him on duty there.'

'Then there was a object in it, and a proper good one too, I'll be
sworn,' retorted Dennis with a broad grin, and an oath of the same
quality. 'What was it, brother?'

'Why, you see,' said Hugh, crawling a little nearer to him, 'that our
noble captain yonder, came in yesterday morning rather the worse for
liquor, and was--like you and me--ditto last night.'

Dennis looked to where Simon Tappertit lay coiled upon a truss of hay,
snoring profoundly, and nodded.

'And our noble captain,' continued Hugh with another laugh, 'our noble
captain and I, have planned for to-morrow a roaring expedition, with
good profit in it.'

'Again the Papists?' asked Dennis, rubbing his hands.

'Ay, against the Papists--against one of 'em at least, that some of us,
and I for one, owe a good heavy grudge to.'

'Not Muster Gashford's friend that he spoke to us about in my house,
eh?' said Dennis, brimfull of pleasant expectation.

'The same man,' said Hugh.

'That's your sort,' cried Mr Dennis, gaily shaking hands with him,
'that's the kind of game. Let's have revenges and injuries, and all
that, and we shall get on twice as fast. Now you talk, indeed!'

'Ha ha ha! The captain,' added Hugh, 'has thoughts of carrying off a
woman in the bustle, and--ha ha ha!--and so have I!'

Mr Dennis received this part of the scheme with a wry face, observing
that as a general principle he objected to women altogether, as being
unsafe and slippery persons on whom there was no calculating with any
certainty, and who were never in the same mind for four-and-twenty hours
at a stretch. He might have expatiated on this suggestive theme at
much greater length, but that it occurred to him to ask what connection
existed between the proposed expedition and Barnaby's being posted at
the stable-door as sentry; to which Hugh cautiously replied in these
words:

'Why, the people we mean to visit, were friends of his, onc