against their sons and
their daughters who are haughty, and walk with stretched-forth neck and
wanton eyes, walking and mincing and making a tinkling with their feet.
Cursed be they all! Surely they shall be as Sodom and Gomorrah, even the
breeding of salt-pits and a perpetual desolation!"

"Your curses seem not to have availed, friend," said Landless. "Curses
are apt to come home to roost. I should judge that yours have returned
to you in the shape of branding-irons."

The man raised a skeleton hand and stroked the red letter.

"This," he said coolly, "was given me when I ran away the second time.
The first time I was merely whipped. The third time I was shaven and
this shackle put upon my leg." He raised his foot and pointed to an iron
ring encircling the ankle. "The fourth time I was nailed by the ears to
the pillory, whence come these pretty scars."

Landless burst into grim laughter. "And after your fifth attempt, what
then?"

The man gave him a sidelong look. "I have not made my fifth attempt," he
said quietly.

They worked in silence for a few minutes. Then said Master Win-Grace
Porringer:--

"I was sent to the plantations, because, in defiance of the Act of
Uniformity (cursed be it, and the authors thereof), I attended a meeting
of the persecuted and broken remnant of the Lord's people. What was your
offense, friend, for I reckon that you come not here of your free will,
being neither a rustic nor a fool?"

"I came from Newgate," said Landless, after a pause. "I am a convict."

The man's hand stopped in the act of pulling off a shoot. He gave a slow
upward look at the figure beside him, let his eyes rest upon the face,
and looked slowly down again with a shake of the head.

"Humph!" he said. "The society in Newgate must be improved since my
time."

They worked without speaking until they had nearly reached the end of
the long double row, when said the Muggletonian:--

"You are too young, I take it, to have seen service in the wars?"

"I fought at Worcester."

"Upon which side?"

"The Commonwealth's."

"I thought as much. Humph! You were all, Parliament and Presbytery,
Puritan and Independent, Hampden and Vane and Oliver, in the gall of
bitterness and the bond of iniquity, very far from the pure light in
which walk the followers of the blessed Ludovick. At the last the two
witnesses will speak against you also. But in the mean time it were
easier for the children of light to walk under the r