venerable patriarch sitting in the chimney corner; neither the sanctity of the matron, nor the loveliness of the youthful bride; no, nor the warlike self-devotion of the noble young man, fighting as the champion of altars and hearths; none of these searching appeals would reach _my_ heart; neither sex nor age would confer any privilege with me; that I should put them all to the edge of the sword; that I should raze the very foundations of their old ancestral houses; having done which, I should probably plow up the ground with some bushels of Nantwich salt, mixed with bonedust from the graves of infants as a top-dressing; that, in fact, the custom of all warriors, and therefore by necessity of myself, was notoriously to make a wilderness, and to call it a pacification; with other bloody depositions in the same key, and often in the very same words. [Footnote 5: From the naked character of the whole _area_ on each side of the Oxford-road, at that time, there was very little opening for ambuscades. What little there was, which greatly fascinated my brother as one of the features connecting his own strategies with those of Cæsar, lay exclusively among the brick-kilns. Of these, there were numbers on the clay-fields adjacent to the road: and sometimes having been irregularly _quarried_ (so to speak), they opened into lanes and closets, which offered facilities for momentary concealment. But the advantages almost ceased to be such from their obviousness, and the consequent jealousy with which they were watched and approached. The particular mode of my three captures was the constant mode of my danger; two or three parallel files advanced up the rising ground from the river; one or two of these by shouts, by more conspicuous activity, and by numerical superiority, succeeded in winning too exclusive an attention, while a slender thread of stragglers, noiseless, and apparently not acting in concert, suddenly converged when approaching the summit of the ascent, and instantly swept so rapidly round the left of my position, as in one moment to take away all chance of restoring the connection between myself and my brother; while, at the same time, by exposing too decisively for doubt the preconcerted plan on which they had really been moving, when most of all simulating the disarray of stragglers, they mortified us by the conviction that students of Cæsar's Commentaries might chance, notwithstanding, to show themselves most exemplary blockheads.]