ovelly Court, and mentioned, with a "by the by," news
which made Will Cary leap from his seat almost to the ceiling. What it
was we know already.

"And there is no clue?" asked old Cary; for his son was speechless.

"Only this; I hear that some fellow prowling about the cliffs that night
saw a pinnace running for Lundy."

Will rose, and went hastily out of the room.

In half an hour he and three or four armed servants were on board a
trawling-skiff, and away to Lundy. He did not return for three days,
and then brought news: that an elderly man, seemingly a foreigner, had
been lodging for some months past in a part of the ruined Moresco
Castle, which was tenanted by one John Braund; that a few weeks since a
younger man, a foreigner also, had joined him from on board a ship: the
ship a Flushinger, or Easterling of some sort. The ship came and went
more than once; and the young man in her. A few days since, a lady and
her maid, a stout woman, came with him up to the castle, and talked with
the elder man a long while in secret; abode there all night; and then
all three sailed in the morning. The fishermen on the beach had heard
the young man call the other father. He was a very still man, much as a
mass-priest might be. More they did not know, or did not choose to
know.

Whereon old Cary and Sir Richard sent Will on a second trip with the
parish constable of Hartland (in which huge parish, for its sins, is
situate the Isle of Lundy, ten miles out at sea); who returned with the
body of the hapless John Braund, farmer, fisherman, smuggler, etc.;
which worthy, after much fruitless examination (wherein examinate was
afflicted with extreme deafness and loss of memory), departed to Exeter
gaol, on a charge of "harboring priests, Jesuits, gipsies, and other
suspect and traitorous persons."

Poor John Braund, whose motive for entertaining the said ugly customers
had probably been not treason, but a wife, seven children, and arrears
of rent, did not thrive under the change from the pure air of Lundy to
the pestiferous one of Exeter gaol, made infamous, but two years after
(if I recollect right), by a "black assizes," nearly as fatal as that
more notorious one at Oxford; for in it, "whether by the stench of the
prisoners, or by a stream of foul air," judge, jury, counsel, and
bystanders, numbering among them many members of the best families in
Devon, sickened in court, and died miserably within a few days.

John Braun