"My Mother says it is heathenish to talk of omens and auguries. And my Father says these foreigners are the worst omen, and all would be well enough if they would leave Englishmen to fight out their own quarrels, like neighbours, who exchange blows and are friends again, instead of like wretched hired Lanzknechts or Free Companions. "But Sir Launcelot laughs, and says it is a good thing to give the whining Puritans something to cry for at last. And Harry sighs, and says he supposes it is necessary to make the rebels see we are in earnest. "Altogether, we do not seem in very good humour with each other just now. However, a few victories will no doubt set us all right again. There can be no reasonable doubt that the king will bring these rebels to their senses sooner or later; in a few months at latest. "Only I had not understood at all how very melancholy war is. I thought of it as concerning no one but the soldiers. And men must incur danger one way or another. And there is the glory, and the excitement, and the exercise of noble courage, making such men as nothing but such trials can make. "But the battles seem but a small part of the misery; the misery without glory to any one. "On our way hither from York, my Mother was faint and tired, and we stopped at a little farm-house with an orchard. It was evening, and the woman had just finished milking the cows by the door, and she gave my Mother a cup of new milk while she rested on the settle in the clean little kitchen. There were two little children playing about, and the father was at work in the orchard, and one of the children called him, and he brought my Father a cup of cider. And there was a Bible on the table with wood-cuts; and I found the eldest child knew the meaning of them. He said his father had told him. They were very kind and pleasant to us. "And a few days since Harry told me they had passed a little farm with an orchard, and the man was surly and a Puritan, and refused to tell the way some fugitives had fled; and Prince Rupert had him hanged on his own threshold, and drove off the cows for plunder. "And from what Harry says I feel sure it is the same. "And I have scarcely slept since, thinking of that poor man, and the silent voice that will never any more explain the wood-cuts in the old Bible, and the poor hands that will never show their willing hospitality again. "But it is only one, Harry says, among hundreds; and such things must be, and I must not think of it. "But every one of the hundreds is just that terrible only one, which leaves the world all lonely to some poor mourner! "Those gentlemen in Parliament have dreadful things to answer for. "Why did not Mr. Hampden pay a thousand times his miserable ship-money rather than lead the country on to such horrors? "For the king cannot have his commands disobeyed. If he did, how could he be a king?