’Twas so curious to see the plain thus suddenly fill’d with rabble, all running from the south, and the silly startled sheep rushing helter-skelter, and huddling together on the tors above, that I forgot my own likely danger if any of this revengeful crew should come upon me lying there: and was satisfied to watch them as they straggled over the moors toward the road. Some pass’d close to the cottage; but none seem’d anxious to pause there. ’Twas a glad and a sorry sight. I saw a troop of dragoons with a standard in their midst; and a drummer running behind, too far distracted even to cast his drum away, so that it dangled against his back, with a great rent where the music had been; and then two troopers running together; and one that was wounded lay down for a while within a stone’s throw of me, and would not go further, till at last his comrade persuaded him; and after them a larger company, in midst of whom was a man crying, “We are sold, I tell ye, and I can point to the man!” and so passed by. There were some, too, that were galloping three stout horses in a carriage, and upon it a brass twelve pounder. But the carriage stuck fast in a quag, and so they cut the traces and left it there, where, two days after, Sir John Berkeley’s dragoons found and pulled it out. And this was the fourth, I had heard, that the King’s troops took in that victory. Yet there were not above five or six hundred in all that I saw; and I guessed (as was the case) that this must be but an off-shoot, so to say, of the bigger rout that pass’d eastward through Liskeard. I was thinking of this when I heard footsteps near, and a man came panting through a gap in the wall, into the yard. He was a big, bareheaded fellow, exceedingly flush’d with running, but unhurt, as far as I could see. Indeed, he might easily have kill’d me, and for a moment I thought sure he would. But catching sight of me, he nodded very friendly, and sitting on a heap of stones a yard or two away, began to draw off his boot, and search for a prickle, that it seem’d had got into it. “’Tis a mess of it, yonder,” said he, quietly, and jerk’d his thumb over his shoulder. By the look of me, he could tell I was on the other side; but this did not appear to concern him. “How has it gone?” asked I. “Well,” says he, with his nose in the boot; “we had a pretty rising ground, and the Cornishmen march’d up and whipp’d us out—that’s all—and took a mort o’ prisoners.” He found the prickle, drew on his boot again, and asked— “T’other side?” I nodded. “That’s the laughing side, this day. Good evening.” And with that he went off as fast as he came. ’Twas, may be, an hour after, that another came in through the same gap: this time a lean, hawk-eyed man, with a pinch’d face and two ugly gashes—one across the brow from left eye to the roots of his hair, the other in his leg below the knee, that had sliced through boot and flesh like a scythe-cut. His face was smear’d with blood, and he carried a musket.