It was but slowly and reluctantly that this conviction grew on the nation. Those who look back on the king's life, hallowed by the shadow of his death, little know how slowly and reluctantly. We would fain have trusted him if he would have let us. The nation tried it again and again, and only too much was sacrificed before they would believe it was in vain. Still there had been no battle. The Earl of Essex, after following the Prince from Worcester, lingered there three weeks, doing nothing. No battle worth the name for nearly a hundred and seventy years, until Sunday the 23d of October, 1642. Then came the first great shock. All that Sunday afternoon our countrymen, husbands, brothers, fathers, sons of the women left in the quiet villages at home, were fighting in the desperate struggle for life and death, until at night four thousand Englishmen lay dead on the slopes of Edgehill, or dying in the villages around--the day before as tranquil and peaceful as ours. I remember there was a peculiar quiet about that Sunday at Netherby. So many of the men of the village had gone to the war. Roger had been away many weeks, and my Father had left some days before to join Lord Essex at Worcester. In all our household there were no men left except Bob the herdsman. The church was strangely deserted. The Hall pew empty. Scarcely one deep manly voice in response or psalm. On the benches in the village a few old men had an unwonted monopoly of talk, and the lads on anything like the verge of manhood strode heavily about with a new sense of importance. One asked another for news. But there was none, save rumours of mysterious marchings and counter-marchings of troops, without any aim that we knew, or the echo of some far-off foray of Prince Rupert's. There was a dreamy stillness all around. Tib's voice came up alone from the kitchen as she moved about some Sabbath work of necessity, and sung rather uncertainly snatches of the psalm we had sung at prayers in the morning. From the slope where the house stood (which gave us that wide range over the levels which I miss everywhere else), I saw the cattle feeding far off in the marshy lands, too far for any sound of their voices to reach me. The harvest was over on the nearer slopes, so that there was no music of the wind rustling through the corn. The land lay half slumbering in its autumn rest, like Roger's faithful Lion in his Sunday afternoon sleep on the terrace below. But, I knew not why, there seemed to me a kind of expectancy in this calm. A waiting and listening seemed to palpitate through this stillness of the land such as pervaded Lion's slumbers as he couched, quivering at every sound, vainly waiting for Roger's voice to summon him as usual at this hour for a walk in the fields. The feeling grew on me, till all this quiet seemed not as the rest after a calm, but the calm before a storm; and the silence excited in me as if it were the breathless hush of thousands of beating hearts.