But there was one more visit to be paid and one more farewell to be
spoken ere Nigel could leave the moorlands where he had dwelled so long.
That evening he donned his brightest tunic, dark purple velvet of Genoa,
with trimming of miniver, his hat with the snow-white feather curling
round the front, and his belt of embossed silver round his loins.
Mounted on lordly Pommers, with his hawk upon wrist and his sword by
his side, never did fairer young gallant or one more modest in mind set
forth upon such an errand. It was but the old Knight of Duplin to whom
he would say farewell; but the Knight of Duplin had two daughters, Edith
and Mary, and Edith was the fairest maid in all the heather-country.

Sir John Buttesthorn, the Knight of Duplin, was so called because he had
been present at that strange battle, some eighteen years before, when
the full power of Scotland had been for a moment beaten to the ground by
a handful of adventurers and mercenaries, marching under the banner
of no nation, but fighting in their own private quarrel. Their exploit
fills no pages of history, for it is to the interest of no nation to
record it, and yet the rumor and fame of the great fight bulked large in
those times, for it was on that day when the flower of Scotland was left
dead upon the field, that the world first understood that a new force
had arisen in war, and that the English archer, with his robust courage
and his skill with the weapon which he had wielded from his boyhood, was
a power with which even the mailed chivalry of Europe had seriously to
reckon.

Sir John after his return from Scotland had become the King's own head
huntsman, famous through all England for his knowledge of venery, until
at last, getting overheavy for his horses, he had settled in modest
comfort into the old house of Cosford upon the eastern slope of the
Hindhead hill. Here, as his face grew redder and his beard more white,
he spent the evening of his days, amid hawks and hounds, a flagon of
spiced wine ever at his elbow, and his swollen foot perched upon a stool
before him. There it was that many an old comrade broke his journey as
he passed down the rude road which led from London to Portsmouth, and
thither also came the young gallants of the country to hear the stout
knight's tales of old wars, or to learn, from him that lore of the
forest and the chase which none could teach so well as he.

But sooth to say, whatever the old knight might think, it wa