As I returned, the world, though in itself as transitory and uncertain as ever, was once more a solid pathway to me, because underneath it stood the foundation of an Almighty love, one word from whom was stronger and more enduring than all the worlds. So we sang our evening psalm, and slept quietly that night at Netherby, knowing nothing of the four thousand pale and rigid corpses that lay stretched on the blood-stained battle-slopes at Edgehill, while Lord Essex encamped on the silent battle-field, and the king's watch-fires were kindled on the hill above, where he began the day, and no ground was gained on either side; only the lives of four thousand men lost. If we may say "lost" of any life yielded up to duty, and called back to God! In the tongues of men, we speak of lives lost on battle-fields: perhaps in the tongue of angels they speak of lives lost in easy and luxurious homes. CHAPTER VIII. OLIVE'S RECOLLECTIONS. It was not till mid-day on Monday the 24th of October 1642, that the first tidings reached us of Keinton Fight, or, as some call it, the Battle of Edgehill. Tidings indeed they scarcely were, only rumours, as of far-off thunder faintly moaning through the heat and stillness of a summer's noon, mysterious, uncertain, scarcely louder than the hum of insects in the sunshine, yet almost more awful than the crash of the thunder-peal overhead. "Wars and rumours of wars." Until that Monday I had no conception of the significance of that word "rumours." I had anticipated the sudden shocks, the ruthless desolations of war; I had not thought of its terrible uncertainties, its heart-sickening suspenses. At noon, when the few men left in the village were all away in the fields at work, a travelling tinker passed by who that morning about daybreak had done some work at a farm where the swineherd keeping his swine the evening before, on the edge of a beech-forest some miles to the south, had heard the sounds far off in the south-west, in the direction of Oxford, like the thunder of great guns, and the sharp cracking of musketry. The tinker did what tinkering was needed in the village, in the absence of Job the village smith, and went on his way. Just after he left, Aunt Gretel and I went to take broken meat and broth to two or three sick and aged people, and we found all the women gathered around the black and silent forge, or rather around Rachel, while she sat quietly patching in the porch of the cottage; the latticed, narrow cottage-windows letting in too little light for any work that required to be neatly done. An eager excited crowd it was, the scanty measure of the text only furnishing wider margin for the commentary. Rachel, meanwhile, sat quietly in the middle, like a mother among a number of eager chattering children. As we reached the group, poor Margery, Dickon's young wife, with her child in her arms, half-sobbed,--