Back came Eliot with the magistrate, a civil squire, and the neighbourly Berkshire yeomen who loathed the work. He made them turn the whole house topsy-turvy, nor desist till evenfall; then, finding nothing, they withdrew. However, they returned almost in the same breath, egged on by Eliot, who now would have the walls sounded. The Abingdon magistrate apologized to Mrs. Yate, not for the Queen’s warrant, but for his associate, “the mad-man,” as he called him, who was carrying it out. The lady was an invalid; thinking not altogether of herself, she railed and wept. The magistrate kindly soothed her fears, and allowed her to sleep where she pleased, undisturbed by his men and their din. She chose to have a bed made up close to the hiding-place. She was conducted thither with the honours of war, and a sentinel was posted at the room door. The tapping and smashing went merrily on elsewhere until late at night, when, by her orders, the sheriff’s baffled underlings made a fine supper, and being worn out, fell asleep over their cups, even as they were expected to do. Poor Mrs. Yate was either by nature the silliest of women, or else her nerves were upset by illness and trying circumstance, for she sent for Fr. Campion, as well as for all her other guests who were in that part of the house, and requested him, as he stood by her bedside—of all possible things—to preach to them just once more! One could not in courtesy refuse a hostess, however unreasonable, who was risking so much for him; nor would it have been like him to refuse. Allen tells us that it was his invariable habit to preach “once a day at the least, often twice, and sometimes thrice, whereby through God’s goodness he converted sundry in most shires of this realm of most wisdom and worship, besides young gentlemen students, and others of all sorts.” Fr. Campion discharged his task. As the little congregation broke up, some one stumbled in the dark, and several fell; the snoring sentinel awoke; searchers, with lanterns and axes, swarmed up from below. There was nothing to be seen: Lyford was not honeycombed in vain with hidden passages. The men-at-arms had been fooled too often, and were angry with Eliot. Yet that functionary knew that something was still really afoot, that the alarm was not a false one. On going down the stairs again he struck his hand upon the wall over it. “We have not broken through here!” he said. A loyal servant of the Yates, who was at his side, and who knew it was just there the refugees lay, muttered that enough wall had been ruined already, and then went deadly pale while Eliot’s eye was still on him. The latter called, in triumph, for a smith’s hammer, and banged it into the thin timber partition, and into the narrow cell. And thus was Father Edmund Campion taken at Lyford Grange, at dawn of Monday, July 17th, in the year 1581.