and maintained at his own expense, a troop of horse that were ever with him throughout the first period of that long and evil war, I mean until the fight at Naseby in Yorkshire. There he lost great part of his following upon the field, and was himself grievously hurt. Yet with that scent, as I may say, which led him in all those years ever where the work was hottest, he was found again in the Welsh rising three years later, whence, escaping after the fall of Pembroke Castle, he joined himself with his little remnant of troopers to the Scots, in bare time to share their overthrow at Warrington by the late Protector (although he had not then that title). Sore in mind, sick in body,--for he was never wholly healed of his great wound in the right thigh which he took at Naseby,--he reached home only to hear of his King's terrible end. 'T is perhaps strange to tell that this awful deed of murder and sacrilege put a new heart in that much-buffeted and enduring gentleman, my father. That Martyrdom, I think, went far to atone, in Sir Michael's mind and heart, for certain wrongs and fickle veerings of purpose, proceeding as much from the complexion as the misfortunes of that pious Martyr and unhappy King. No word did he ever utter to asperse the royal memory; yet once in the passage of these more recent transactions of state, which have brought into my life, as into that of the nation at large, so much of betterment, did I hear him murmur (though but as for his own ear alone), "Ay, ay--he served us best, when they served him worst." Be that as it may, from that hour until the happy restoration of King Charles the Second, all that he had--the remnant of health, much of his land, the lives of his sons, the thoughts of his mind, and the prayer of his heart, were given to forward that happy end, which was achieved, as all men know and many remember, in the year 1660--but, for the house of Drayton, at what a cost!