Three o’clock, and the governor, the Elder, and the captain came out of the house of the first, robed in their official garments, and stood upon a platform of squared logs erected at the intersection of the streets and mounted with two small cannon called patereros. A blast from the trumpet, and the gate of the Fort upon the hill swung open, and out came a strange procession: first, Bart Allerton with his drum, and three other young fellows with wind instruments, who rendered a fair imitation of the Rogue’s March; then twenty picked men, mostly from among the first-comers, each carrying his snaphance reversed; then Master Oldhame, bareheaded and barefooted, and with his arms tied across his chest; and finally, Lieutenant John Alden, bearing a naked sword, followed by a guard of four men well armed. Down the hill they came at a foot-pace, the bugles and trumpet shrilling out their contemptuous cadences, and Oldhame, his pride subdued and his pot-valiancy all evaporated, stepping delicately as Agog, for the pebbles hurt his bare feet, and perhaps feeling with Agog that the bitterness of death was at his lips. Before the platform, where stood the magnates and the cannon, the procession paused, the music ceased, and upon the silence rose the governor’s calm, strong voice. “John Oldhame, you have come hither in defiance of the formal edict of this government banishing you from the colony; and you have come with violence and insult, refusing to accept warning, or to depart peaceably. We therefore have resolved that since you return dishonorably, you shall depart in dishonor, taking with you the warning for the future, that the barrels of our pieces are more deadly than their stocks. Go, and mend your manners!” He waved his hand, and the bugles recommenced their blare, while the twenty men opened their ranks and ranged themselves in two lines some three feet apart, but not directly opposite each other. “Go on, prisoner!” ordered Alden, touching Oldhame with the hilt of his sword. “Go, and mend your manners!” And as the cowed yet furious rebel stepped forward, the first man of the line struck upward with the stock of his reversed musket, saying,-- “Go, and mend your manners!” The next instant the same blow and the same words fell from the minuteman diagonally opposite, and so down the entire line, until as the twentieth blow and twenty-second adjuration to “Go, and mend your manners” fell upon the humiliated bully, he broke down utterly, and with a howl of mingled rage and pain bolted into the door of John Howland’s house next below Stephen Hopkins’s, but was met by Elizabeth, who with little John clinging to her skirts and Desire in her arms boldly faced the intruder for a moment, and then looking into his streaming face and hunted eyes cried pitifully,-- “Oh, poor soul!” and seizing the scissors at her girdle cut the band confining his arms, and catching up a tankard of ale set ready for her husband held it to his lips, muttering,--