stions as they put he answered cautiously
enough, and professing even more ignorance than he had, for which his
examiners willingly enough gave him credit. He did not say a word about
the window or the cupboard over the fireplace; and these secrets quite
escaped the eyes of the searchers.

So then my lady was consigned to her coach, and sent off to Hexton, with
her woman and the man of law to bear her company, a couple of troopers
riding on either side of the coach. And Harry was left behind at the Hall,
belonging as it were to nobody, and quite alone in the world. The captain
and a guard of men remained in possession there; and the soldiers, who
were very good-natured and kind, ate my lord's mutton and drank his wine,
and made themselves comfortable, as they well might do, in such pleasant
quarters.

The captains had their dinner served in my lord's tapestry parlour, and
poor little Harry thought his duty was to wait upon Captain Westbury's
chair, as his custom had been to serve his lord when he sat there.

After the departure of the countess, Dick the Scholar took Harry Esmond
under his special protection, and would examine him in his humanities, and
talk to him both of French and Latin, in which tongues the lad found, and
his new friend was willing enough to acknowledge, that he was even more
proficient than Scholar Dick. Hearing that he had learned them from a
Jesuit, in the praise of whom and whose goodness Harry was never tired of
speaking, Dick, rather to the boy's surprise, who began to have an early
shrewdness, like many children bred up alone, showed a great deal of
theological science, and knowledge of the points at issue between the two
Churches; so that he and Harry would have hours of controversy together,
in which the boy was certainly worsted by the arguments of this singular
trooper. "I am no common soldier," Dick would say, and indeed it was easy
to see by his learning, breeding, and many accomplishments, that he was
not. "I am of one of the most ancient families in the Empire; I have had
my education at a famous school, and a famous university; I learned my
first rudiments of Latin near to Smithfield, in London, where the martyrs
were roasted."

"You hanged as many of ours," interposed Harry; "and, for the matter of
persecution, Father Holt told me that a young gentleman of Edinburgh,
eighteen years of age, student at the college there, was hanged for heresy
only last year, though he recanted, and