“And now to work, my friends, to work!” cried the governor. “I for one am famished, sith my dame was so busy at noontide with that wonderful structure yonder that she gave me naught but bread and cheese.” Everybody laughed, and Alice Bradford colored like a red, red rose, yet bravely answered,-- “The governor will have his jest, but I hope my raised pie will suffer roundly for its interference with his dinner.” “Faith, dame, but we’ll all help to punish it,” exclaimed Stephen Hopkins, gazing fondly at the elaborate mass of pastry representing, not inartistically, a castle with battlements and towers, and a floating banner of silk bearing an heraldic device. “Standish! we call upon you to lead us to the assault!” “Nay, if Captain Standish is summoned to the field, my fortress surrenders without even a parley,” said Alice Bradford, as she gracefully drew the little banner from its place, and, laying it aside, removed a tower, a bastion, and a section of the battlement from the doomed fortress, and, loading a plate with the spoils of its treasury, planted the banner upon the top, and sent it to the captain, who received it with a bow and a smile, but never a word. “Speak up, man!” cried Hopkins boisterously. “Make a gallant speech in return for the courtesy of so fair a castellaine.” “Mistress Bradford needs no speech to assure her of my devoir,” replied the captain simply, and the governor added,-- “Our captain speaks more by deeds than words, and Gideon is his most eloquent interpreter. You have not brought him to-day, Captain.” “No; Gideon sulks in these days of peace, and seldom stirs abroad.” “Long may he be idle!” exclaimed the Elder, and a gentle murmur around the board told that the women at least echoed the prayer. But Hopkins, seated next to Mistress Bradford, and watching her distribution of the pie, cared naught for war or peace until he secured a trencher of its contents, and presently cried,-- “Now, by my faith, I did not know such a pye as this could be concocted out of Yorkshire! ’Tis perfect in all its parts: fowl, and game, and pork, and forcemeat, and yolks of eggs, and curious art of spicery, and melting bits of pastry within, and stout-built walls without; in fact, there is naught lacking to such a pye as my mother used to make before I had the wit to know such pyes sing not on every bush.” “You’re Yorkshire, then, Master Hopkins?” asked John Howland, who with his young wife, once Elizabeth Tilley, sat opposite. “Yes, I’m Yorkshire, root and branch, and you’re Essex, and the captain and the governor Lancashire, but all shaken up in a bag now, and turned into New Englanders, and since the Yorkshire pye has come over along with us I’m content for one.” A general laugh indorsed this patriotic speech, but Myles Standish, toying with the silken banner of the now sacked and ruined fortress, said in Bradford’s ear,--