Fugitives from the law must have a care where they go, and to whom they appeal, yet Ester's father was growing more desperate every moment. He went boldly to the door and gave a timid rap with his knuckle. That hand once bold enough to strike a king from his throne was weak and trembling on this night. At sound of the knock, the husband and father seemed to have suddenly changed. The lion may sport and play with his whelps in his lair, but when the intruder enters his domestic abode, all is changed. He rose, took up the light and went to the door. He was a tall man and, judging from his charcoal-begrimed features, a blacksmith, and he wore a large leathern apron which came quite to his shoulder. As he threw back his head the shirt-front opened, displaying his bare neck and hairy chest. His face was sullen, with a bull-dog expression on it. Without a moment's hesitation, the stranger began: "I am weary, and my child hath had no food to-day. Would you, for money, give us a morsel to eat and a blanket and corner in which to sleep?" "Who are you?" asked the smith. "We came from New Plymouth, and have walked all day. I will pay you well for what you give us." The blacksmith loved money; but those were troublesome times, and people had to be careful whom they admitted into their houses. The king had been restored and was pursuing his enemies with a vengeance, and to harbor a _regicide_ might mean death on the scaffold. The smith thought of all this, and asked: "Why do you not go to one of the inns?" "There is no room there." "Nonsense! that is impossible. Have you been to Robinson's?" "I have been to all." "Well?" The traveller continued with some hesitation, "I do not know why; but they all refuse to take us in." The man knew there was something wrong with the travellers, and turning about, he held a whispered consultation with his wife. She was heard to say in a faint whisper: "It is the same, a man with a child." Then the smith turned on the stranger, and said: "Be off." The proud eye of a daring trooper in despair is the saddest sight one ever gazed upon. Such was the look of the humiliated man, as, with his starving child, he turned from the last door. At times the spirit of revenge rose in his breast, and he was inclined to turn on the men who refused his child food, drink and shelter, and with his stout knotted stick beat out their brains; but, on second thought, he restrained himself and said: "No--no; I will not make an outlaw of myself. I am not a robber." He who had been the commander of thousands, the king of the battle-field, at whose name princes grew pale and thrones tottered, was now a wanderer from house to house, rejected at every door. "I am so hungry," murmured Ester. "If I had but a morsel of food, I could sleep under a tree." He heard the plaintive appeal, and it wrung his fatherly heart. Through his teeth he hissed: "If I am made a savage let all the world beware."