s seemed but a poor backwater of a place, compared with the
rush of the Brighton road eight miles to the east from which he had
turned off, or the whirling cauldron of London City, twenty miles to the
north, towards which he was travelling.

The triangular green, with its stocks and horse-pond, overlooked by the
grey benignant church-tower, seemed a tame exchange for seething
Cheapside and the crowded ways about the Temple or Whitehall; and it was
strange to think that the solemn-faced rustics who stared respectfully at
the gorgeous stranger were of the same human race as the quick-eyed,
voluble townsmen who chattered and laughed and grimaced over the news
that came up daily from the Continent or the North, and was tossed to and
fro, embroidered and discredited alternately, all day long.

And yet the great waves and movements that, rising in the hearts of kings
and politicians, or in the sudden strokes of Divine Providence, swept
over Europe and England, eventually always rippled up into this placid
country village; and the lives of Master Musgrave, who had retired upon
his earnings, and of old Martin, who cobbled the ploughmen's shoes, were
definitely affected and changed by the plans of far-away Scottish
gentlemen, and the hopes and fears of the inhabitants of South Europe.
Through all the earlier part of Elizabeth's reign, the menace of the
Spanish Empire brooded low on the southern horizon, and a responsive
mutter of storm sounded now and again from the north, where Mary Stuart
reigned over men's hearts, if not their homes; and lovers of secular
England shook their heads and were silent as they thought of their tiny
country, so rent with internal strife, and ringed with danger.

For Great Keynes, however, as for most English villages and towns at this
time, secular affairs were so deeply and intricately interwoven with
ecclesiastical matters that none dared decide on the one question without
considering its relation to the other; and ecclesiastical affairs, too,
touched them more personally than any other, since every religious change
scored a record of itself presently within the church that was as
familiar to them as their own cottages.

On none had the religious changes fallen with more severity than on the
Maxwell family that lived in the Hall, at the upper and southern end of
the green. Old Sir Nicholas, though his convictions had survived the
tempest of unrest and trouble that had swept over England, and he