wrote Robyn gaily to his sister, “in prosecution of his search; and I even took my bows and arrows and went to sleep.” They dined next day at Winchester, and lay that night at Salisbury; and there Robyn overtook his trunks, which had been sent on in front of him. In the middle of Salisbury Plain they were surrounded by a party of horse, who would have searched them for “Malignant Letters” such as “use to be about the King’s Picture in a Yellow-Boy.”[134] But the States-Messenger carried them safely through, and they rode on, past weary troops of foot, “poor pressed countrymen,” goaded on by the party of horse. “Amongst them,” wrote Robert Boyle, “I saw one poor rogue, lacqueyed by his wife, and carrying a child upon his shoulders.” Even then, as now, “new models” leave much to be desired. In spite of his bilboa and pistols, Robert Boyle hated the sight of war. “Good God!” he wrote, “that reasonable creatures, that call themselves Christians too, should delight in such an unnatural thing as war, where cruelty at least becomes necessity....” He reached Stalbridge in safety; but the weather had broken, and was wretchedly cold. “We all suspect the almanac-maker of a mistake in setting down March instead of January.” The bad weather kept him indoors, and was “so drooping that it dulls me to all kinds of useful study.” Even his country neighbours were prevented from making their usual “visitations.” Robert Boyle was depressed: Stalbridge was not so lively as London. “My stay here,” he says, “God willing, shall not be long.” There were still troops in the neighbourhood, and the plague had “begun to revive again”; there had been cases at Bristol, and at Yeovil, only six miles off. Dorsetshire was suffering from “fits of the Committee”;[135] and at the Manor itself there were many calls on the Squire’s slender purse. This had for the time been replenished by one of his brothers; and he was going to cut down some of his wood, to repay the loan. He was arranging to make “my brother’s sixty trees bear him some golden fruit”; but this was to be done by instalments—one third at May Day next. And meantime he was trying to settle down to his “standish and books”; but even writing did not come easily. “My Ethics,” he wrote to his sister (of a little treatise he had begun, one of his first literary attempts), “go very slowly on.”[136]