ver such a trifle. I, who am old enough to be your
father, should have known better than to have drawn upon you, for a
boy's tongue wags on impulse and without due thought. Do but say that
you have said more than you meant.'

'My way of saying it may have been over plain and rough,' I answered,
for I saw that he did but want a little salve where my short words had
galled him. 'At the same time, our ways differ from your ways, and that
difference must be mended, or you can be no true comrade of ours.'

'All right, Master Morality,' quoth he, 'I must e'en unlearn some of the
tricks of my trade. Od's feet, man, if ye object to me, what the henker
would ye think of some whom I have known? However, let that pass. It
is time that we were at the wars, for our good swords will not bide in
their scabbards.

"The trenchant blade, Toledo trusty,
For want of fighting was grown rusty,
And ate into itself for lack
Of somebody to hew and hack."

You cannot think a thought but old Samuel hath been before you.'

'Surely we shall be at the end of this dreary plain presently,' Reuben
cried. 'Its insipid flatness is enough to set the best of friends by the
ears. We might be in the deserts of Libya instead of his most graceless
Majesty's county of Wiltshire.'

'There is smoke over yonder, upon the side of that hill,' said Saxon,
pointing to the southward.

'Methinks I see one straight line of houses there,' I observed, shading
my eyes with my hand. 'But it is distant, and the shimmer of the sun
disturbs the sight.'

'It must be the hamlet of Hindon,' said Reuben. 'Oh, the heat of this
steel coat! I wonder if it were very un-soldierly to slip it off and tie
it about Dido's neck. I shall be baked alive else, like a crab in its
shell. How say you, illustrious, is it contravened by any of those
thirty-nine articles of war which you bear about in your bosom?'

'The bearing of the weight of your harness, young man,' Saxon answered
gravely, 'is one of the exercises of war, and as such only attainable by
such practice as you are now undergoing. You have many things to learn,
and one of them is not to present petronels too readily at folk's heads
when you are on horseback. The jerk of your charger's movement even now
might have drawn your trigger, and so deprived Monmouth of an old and
tried soldier.'

'There would be much weight in your contention,' my friend answered,
'were it not that I now