Westward Ho! Or, The Voyages and Adventures of Sir Amyas Leigh, Knight, of Burrough, in the County of Devon, in the Reign of Her Most Glorious Majesty Queen ElizabethKingsley, Charles
History
Westward Ho! Or, The Voyages and Adventures of Sir Amyas Leigh, Knight, of Burrough, in the County of Devon, in the Reign of Her Most Glorious Majesty Queen Elizabeth
Kingsley, Charles
Great Britain -- History -- Elizabeth, 1558-1603 -- Fiction
With which quip against the Anabaptists of his day, Fuller ends his
story; and I leave him to set forth how Amyas, in fear of these same
Scythians and heathens, rode out of Plymouth on a right good horse, in
his full suit of armor, carrying lance and sword, and over and above two
great dags, or horse-pistols; and behind him Salvation Yeo, and five
or six north Devon men (who had served with him in Ireland, and were
returning on furlough), clad in head-pieces and quilted jerkins, each
man with his pike and sword, and Yeo with arquebuse and match, while two
sumpter ponies carried the baggage of this formidable troop.
They pushed on as fast as they could, through Tavistock, to reach before
nightfall Lydford, where they meant to sleep; but what with buying the
horses, and other delays, they had not been able to start before
noon; and night fell just as they reached the frontiers of the enemy's
country. A dreary place enough it was, by the wild glare of sunset. A
high tableland of heath, banked on the right by the crags and hills of
Dartmoor, and sloping away to the south and west toward the foot of the
great cone of Brent-Tor, which towered up like an extinct volcano (as
some say that it really is), crowned with the tiny church, the votive
offering of some Plymouth merchant of old times, who vowed in sore
distress to build a church to the Blessed Virgin on the first point of
English land which he should see. Far away, down those waste slopes,
they could see the tiny threads of blue smoke rising from the dens of
the Gubbings; and more than once they called a halt, to examine whether
distant furze-bushes and ponies might not be the patrols of an advancing
army. It is all very well to laugh at it now, in the nineteenth century,
but it was no laughing matter then; as they found before they had gone
two miles farther.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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