inger in almost all the
conspiracies of the Royalists, to involve him in the unfortunate rising
of Penruddock and Groves, in the west, in which many of the Presbyterian
interest, as well as the Cavalier party, were engaged. And though his
habitual prudence eventually kept him out of this and other dangers,
Major Bridgenorth was considered during the last years of Cromwell's
domination, and the interregnum which succeeded, as a disaffected person
to the Commonwealth, and a favourer of Charles Stewart.

But besides this approximation to the same political opinions, another
bond of intimacy united the families of the Castle and the Hall.
Major Bridgenorth, fortunate, and eminently so, in all his worldly
transactions, was visited by severe and reiterated misfortunes in his
family, and became, in this particular, an object of compassion to his
poorer and more decayed neighbour. Betwixt the breaking out of the Civil
War and the Restoration, he lost successively a family of no less than
six children, apparently through a delicacy of constitution, which cut
off the little prattlers at the early age when they most wind themselves
round the heart of the parents.

In the beginning of the year 1658, Major Bridgenorth was childless; ere
it ended, he had a daughter, indeed, but her birth was purchased by the
death of an affectionate wife, whose constitution had been exhausted by
maternal grief, and by the anxious and harrowing reflection, that from
her the children they had lost derived that delicacy of health, which
proved unable to undergo the tear and wear of existence. The same voice
which told Bridgenorth that he was the father of a living child (it was
the friendly voice of Lady Peveril), communicated to him the melancholy
intelligence that he was no longer a husband. The feelings of Major
Bridgenorth were strong and deep, rather than hasty and vehement; and
his grief assumed the form of a sullen stupor, from which neither the
friendly remonstrances of Sir Geoffrey, who did not fail to be with his
neighbour at this distressing conjuncture, even though he knew he must
meet the Presbyterian pastor, nor the ghastly exhortations of this
latter person, were able to rouse the unfortunate widower.

At length Lady Peveril, with the ready invention of a female sharped
by the sight of distress and the feelings of sympathy, tried on the
sufferer one of those experiments by which grief is often awakened from
despondency into tears. She p