--‘I remember, when the fight was done, When I was dry with rage, and desprit toil, Breathless and faint, leaning upon my sword, Came there a certain lord, neat, trimly dressed, Fresh as a bridegroom’-- Well, I’ll not give you the whole, if I remember it, and ’tis years since I thought on’t, but a little later it goes forward:-- ‘I then, a’l smarting, with my wounds being cold, To be so pestered with a popinjay, Out of my grief and my impatience, Answered full carelessly, I know not what; He should or he should not; for ’t made me mad To see him shine so brisk, and smell so sweet, And talk so like a waiting gentlewoman Of guns, and drums, and wounds, (God save the mark!) And telling me the sovereign’st thing on earth Was parmaceti for an inward bruise; And that it was great pity, so it was, That villainous saltpetre should be digged Out of the bowels of the harmless earth, Which many a good tall fellow had destroyed So cowardly; and but for these vile guns, He would himself have been a soldier.’ Oh, well, well, but I must laugh, and laugh again as I mind me of the day when Will Shakespeare first mouthed those lines at me, and I stood staring like a stuck pig to hear mine own words so bedded in his poesy, like flies in amber in very sooth, for ’twas a story I had told him of a matter that happened to myself in the Low Countries”-- “Alas, my son,” interposed the Elder, raising his hand, “such memories suit but ill with the lives of ‘pilgrims and strangers’ like ourselves.” “And for that very reason, Elder,” replied Standish a little hotly, “when you and Master Partridge and the rest besiege me to become a church-member, I will listen to naught of it. The old leaven is still a-working by fits and starts, and I’ll do no such despite to the saints as to count myself into their company. ‘Nay, nay, mine ancient,’ says Will to me one time when we stood side by side in Paul’s Walk, and saw a grand procession pass us by, ‘’tis better to watch the lightning than to handle it.’” With a mischievous glance at the Rev. Ralph Partridge, Standish resumed his pipe, and the parson wisely remained silent. CHAPTER XXV. JEPHTHAH’S DAUGHTER. St. Martin’s summer was in the land; that lovely parting smile of the year, so full of love, so full of reminiscence and of promise, so full of pathos and of that vague yearning that lies at the core of every heart, and which I fancy Bossuet means when he speaks of “the inexorable weariness which lurks at the foundations of all our lives.” The door of Standish’s cottage stood wide, and between it and the lattice opening upon the sea, letting in the sweet breath of marigolds and thyme basking in the southern sun, Barbara stepped lightly back and forth, spinning from her great wheel the fine yarn that would be woven or knit into the winter garments of the household.