t seems incredible that there was any real call for such singular
caution, under the loose reign of Charles the Second: yet it is
remarkable how timid they had become, and how long they supported their
patient mousing in the dark. Nothing seems to have inspired them with
confidence after this. The pursuers returned to Boston, and made an
indignant report of the contempt with which his Majesty's authority had
been treated at Newhaven; all which had no other effect than to give
colour to a formal declaration of the united colonies of New England,
that an ineffectual though thorough search had been made. On this the
hue-and-cry was suffered to stop; but the regicides still kept close,
and shunned the light of day. Who would have believed that the lusty
Goffe and Whalley, whose fierce files of musqueteers seemed once their
very shadow, could have subsided into such decorous subjects, as to live
for three lustres in the heart of a village, so quietly, that, save
their feeder, not a soul ever saw or heard of them. Yet so it proved;
for so much do circumstances make the difference between the anchorite
and the revolutionist, and so possible is it for the same character to
be very noisy and very still.

After two months more in the cave, they probably found it time to go
into winter quarters, and accordingly shifted to a village a little
westward of Newhaven, where one Tompkins received them into his cellar.
There they managed to survive two years, during which their only
recreation seems to have been, the sorry one of hearing a maid abuse
them, as she sung an old royalist ballad over their heads. Even this was
some relief to the monotony of their life in the cellar, and they would
often get their attendant to set it agoing. The girl, delighted to find
her voice in request, and little dreaming what an audience she had in
the pit, would accordingly strike up with great effect, and fugue away
on the names of Goffe and Whalley, and their fellow Roundheads, another
Wildrake. Perhaps the worthies in the cellar consoled themselves with
recalling the palmy days, when the same song, trolled out on the night
air from some royalist pothouse, had been their excuse for displaying
their vigilant police, and putting under arrest any number of drunken
malignants.

If they had any additional consolation, it seems to have been derived
from an enthusiastic interpretation of Holy Writ, in which, after the
manner of their religion, they saw their