"Cornet Joyce assured His Majesty he meant him no harm; and at length the king went with the soldiers as they desired, they suffering him to choose between two or three places the one he liked best. "So, by easy stages, they conducted him to Childerley, near Newmarket. And it is said the king was the merriest of the company. Heaven send it to be a good augury. "Roger said, moreover, that His Majesty continues to be of good cheer, and the army to be friendly disposed towards him. They have hope yet that Sir Thomas Fairfax, General Cromwell, and Ireton may make some arrangement to which His Majesty may honourably accede. "And, meantime, they allow him not only the attendance of his faithful servants, but his own chaplains to perform the services of the Church, which the Presbyterians refused him at Holmby. Englishmen, especially the common people, and most of all, I think, English soldiers, have honest hearts after all; safer to trust to than those of men armed _cap-a-pie_ in covenants, and catechisms, and confessions. Surely the king will yet win the hearts of the army, and all will yet go right. Roger, meanwhile, is as stately in his courtesy to me as a Spanish hidalgo, listening and assenting to all I say in a way I detest. For it means that he feels our differences too deep to venture on." "_July_ 2_nd_.--Roger has begun to contradict and controvert me again delightfully. This morning we had our first serious battle. "Yester eve I said something about abhoring all middle states of things. It was in reference to the poor peasants flocking around the king. I said there was no poetry in mid-way things, or times, or states, in mid-day, mid-summer, middle-life, or the middle-station in the state. "He took this up earnestly after his manner, and went into a serious argument to prove me wrong. It was but a weakling and half-fledged poesy, quoth he, which must needs go to dew-drops, and rosy clouds, and primroses, and violets, for its smiles and decorations, and could see no glory and beauty in summer or in noon. Summer with its golden ripening harvests, and all its depths of bountiful life in woods and fields; noon-tide with its patient toil or its rapturous hush of rest; manhood and womanhood with their dower of noble work and strength to do it. He could not abide (he said), to hear the spring-tide spoken pulingly of as if it faded instead of ripened into summer, or youth as if it set instead of dawned into manhood. And as to the middle station in a nation, its yeomanry and traders, nations must have their heads to think and their hands to work; but the middle order was the nation's heart. If that was sound, the nation was sound, if that was corrupt and base, the nation's heart was rotten at the core. Which (ended he) he thought these last years, with all their miseries, had proved the heart of England was not.