OLOMON SPRENT.

XXXV. OF THE DEVIL IN WIG AND GOWN.

XXXVI. OF THE END OF IT ALL.

APPENDIX

Chapter I. Of Cornet Joseph Clarke of the Ironsides

It may be, my dear grandchildren, that at one time or another I
have told you nearly all the incidents which have occurred during my
adventurous life. To your father and to your mother, at least, I know
that none of them are unfamiliar. Yet when I consider that time wears
on, and that a grey head is apt to contain a failing memory, I am
prompted to use these long winter evenings in putting it all before
you from the beginning, that you may have it as one clear story in your
minds, and pass it on as such to those who come after you. For now that
the house of Brunswick is firmly established upon the throne and that
peace prevails in the land, it will become less easy for you every
year to understand how men felt when Englishmen were in arms against
Englishmen, and when he who should have been the shield and the
protector of his subjects had no thought but to force upon them what
they most abhorred and detested.

My story is one which you may well treasure up in your memories, and
tell again to others, for it is not likely that in this whole county of
Hampshire, or even perhaps in all England, there is another left alive
who is so well able to speak from his own knowledge of these events,
or who has played a more forward part in them. All that I know I shall
endeavour soberly and in due order to put before you. I shall try to
make these dead men quicken into life for your behoof, and to call back
out of the mists of the past those scenes which were brisk enough in
the acting, though they read so dully and so heavily in the pages of the
worthy men who have set themselves to record them. Perchance my words,
too, might, in the ears of strangers, seem to be but an old man's
gossip. To you, however, who know that these eyes which are looking at
you looked also at the things which I describe, and that this hand has
struck in for a good cause, it will, I know, be different. Bear in mind
as you listen that it was your quarrel as well as our own in which
we fought, and that if now you grow up to be free men in a free land,
privileged to think or to pray as your consciences shall direct, you may
thank God that you are reaping the harvest which your fathers sowed in
blood and suffering when the Stuarts were on the throne.

I was born then in the year 1664, at Havan