Yates, their brother-in-law—Charles Stuart,
mounted upon the mill-horse of bluff
Humphrey, sets forth. Leaving Boscobel, his
advance from that time forth is almost
uninterruptedly equestrian. His escort now
conducts him by lonely bye-lanes to
Penford's Mill, below Cotsall. Poor Will is
nearly worn out by the rough jogging of
the mill-horse: to the groaned-out
complaint of whose joltering paces has not
Humphrey, simple miller though he is, replied
in those ready and courtly words of extenuation,
"Can you blame the horse, my liege,
to go heavily when he has the weight of three
kingdoms on his back?" Dismounting at
the point last-mentioned, Charles stumbles
with a diminished suite across the midnight
fields, until, after a toilsome tramp of three
miles, through hedge and ditch, he arrives at
a meadow called Alport's Leasom. Thence
his servants are led away from him to the
buttery-hatch of Moseley Hall by the owner
of that mansion, Mr. Thomas Whitgreave,
formerly a lieutenant in the army of the late
sovereign. Meanwhile, Charles himself is
making straight for a light in my lord
Wilmot's chamber in that great house of
Moseley: my lord, with a lighted taper in
his hand, awaiting his Majesty's approach at
the stair-foot leading to it, and thereupon
conducting him up to his room, delighted.
Here King Charles in his sordid disguise is
introduced by Lord Wilmot as " his master,
and the master of them all," to the loyal host
himself; and, with him, to a personage who,
like himself, had originally been a gentleman
volunteer in the late monarch's army,—one
Father Huddlestone, then a secular priest,
afterwards a Benedictine monk, ultimately one
of the queen's chaplains; and now generally
reported to have been the priest who, thirty-
four years later on, was smuggled by Chiffinch
into the royal bed-chamber at Whitehall
during the King's last moments, and who
there administered to the dying monarch the
last rites of the Roman Catholic religion.
Having received the obeisance offered to him,
the weary wight of a prince is refreshed
with sack and biscuit. They lave his
blistered feet—extracting from between the
toes, little rolls of paper cruelly put there
by some ill advice to prevent the galling
they have only grievously increased. They
exchange his wet clothes for others in
every respect more comfortable—giving him
in lieu of the old hogging shirt, a warm
flaxen one belonging to Father Huddlestone.
Solaced by these then unwonted enjoyments—
his heart glows anew, his hopes rise again
within him as he sits musingly by the cheerful
wood-blaze, watching its reflection in the
Dutch tiles lining the hearth of that quaint
old fire-place still preserved at Moseley Hall
unchanged. " If it .would please Almighty
God," he says, with the sack yet relishing
upon his lips, " If it would please Almighty
God to send me once more an army of ten
thousand good and loyal soldiers and subjects,
I should fear not to expel all the rogues forth
from my kingdom." With the walnut juice
yet freshly embrowning his face and hands,
with the black thorn stick leaning in the chimney-
corner there against the mantel-piece,
with the billhook on yonder chair—his only
weapon offensive or defensive—he still
meditates wresting his subjects and his kingdom
from the strong grasp of Oliver and his
Roundheads! Shortly afterwards he has laid that
close-cropped roundhead of his own upon the
pillow vouchsafed to him at Moseley, and is
dreaming calmly, perhaps, of having been
victorious instead of vanquished in the fight
at Worcester.

Having sojourned a couple of days,
under the hospitable roof-tree of Mr.
Whitgreave—during which interval of
anxious repose his Majesty has been
constantly attended upon by Father Huddlestone,
while the chaplain's three youthful
pupils, by name, Francis Reynolds, Thomaa
Palyn, and a boy-baronet, one Sir John
Preston, have kept watch and ward from the
garret-windows, unconscious of his dignity,
yet calling themselves his life-guard—Charles
at length, in the dusk of Tuesday evening, the
ninth of September, resumes his perilous journey
coastwards. Mistress Whitgreave, the
venerable mother of the Squire of Moseley,
filling the royal pockets with the oddest
refection for a flying sovereign; even almonds
and raisins, and sweetmeats.

Munching some of these condiments, as he
mounts the saddle, and giving his hand to be
kissed by his late devoted servitors—country
gentleman and recusant priest, there kneeling
in the grass by his stirrup to offer him their
farewell reverence—Charles Stuart rides out
of the orchard-gate, muffled in a warm cloak
lent to him for the occasion, with a kindly
thought, by Father Huddlestone. Colonel
Lane has now become the king's guide and
sole attendant; the colonel's country-seat of
Bentley Hall being then their immediate
destination. There the two wayfarers arrive,
in due course, towards the middle of the
night, and thence they take their departure
again at daybreak on the following morning
—his Majesty having here undergone in the
interim his more respectable transformation.
Colonel Lane, however, and King Charles
journey onwards from this point by different
though parallel routes to the more remote
destination, the residence of Mr. George
Norton, situated some three miles beyond
the city of Bristol, and known as Abbotsleigh.

Thither pretty Mistress Jane Lane, the
colonel's sister, is wending her way on a visit
to her friend, Mistress Norton, under a pass
available for herself and a single male attendant.
That attendant being now impersonated
in the character of the yeoman's son, Will
Jackson, by the ready-witted sovereign. So
accounted and so designated, Charles sets