Under the protection of the maid-servant, who was mature and fat, Dick Wetheral was allowed to slumber till the afternoon. He awoke entirely refreshed, and, after a curious look through his small window at the snow-covered little town with its picturesque church spire, he went down to the kitchen, and in a corner thereof he satisfied a prodigious appetite; upon which he felt himself in excellent physical condition. His slight flesh-wound, received at Quebec, had healed on his sea-voyage, thanks to the persistent health of his blood, and despite the badness of other circumstances. He walked but twelve miles that day, arriving after nightfall at Liskeard, and lodging till morning at an inn near the handsome Gothic church of St. Martin. When he came to pay his bill he found it took all his money but a few pence, and thus he set forth, on the first day of the year 1776, bound eastward, with empty pockets, friendless in a strange and hostile land, with no fixed intention save the vague one of eventually returning to fight for his country, with no present plan save to keep moving on. Not seeking food once during a journey of seventeen miles, he finally crossed the Tamer, from Cornwall into Devonshire, and arrived at Tavistock with less curiosity to view the vestiges of the tenth century abbey there, than to learn where his dinner was to come from. He had decided to beg, if necessary; he considered that his own people, as was the custom of his country, entertained freely every hungry or roofless man that came to their home in the wilderness, therefore some hospitality was due him from the world at large; and he reasoned that, being now among a hostile people, whose government was responsible for his present situation, he was morally entitled, without reproach, to whatever he could, in the name of charity, obtain from that people. Profiting by some of Tom MacAlister's related experiences, he had bethought himself, on the road, of certain possible methods of overcoming charity's coyness. The first door at which he knocked, in Tavistock, was promptly shut in his face, by a man who blurted out something about rogues and vagabonds, and ere Dick's civil greeting was finished. At the next house a frowning old woman was equally inhospitable. But at the third, the cottage of a serge-weaver, the young girl who opened the door allowed her soft eyes to rest on Dick before making a move to close it, and Dick improved the moment to assure her that he was no common rogue and vagabond, but an honest teller of fortunes by cards, who saw already in her face the signs of a great surprise in her own immediate future. The girl opened the door wider, and Dick stepped in with such a courteous bow to the two other occupants of the room that they rose instinctively to receive him, blinded to his garb by his gentlemanly bearing. It was meal-time, and the family at table consisted of father, mother, and the girl who had opened the door.