looking down in safety on soldiers who were searching
the wood for royalist fugitives. From time to time, indeed, parties of
search passed under the very tree which bore such royal fruit, and the
prince and the major heard their chat with no little amusement.

Charles light-hearted by nature, and a mere boy in years,--he had just
passed twenty-one,--was rising above the heavy sense of depression which
had hitherto borne him down. His native temperament was beginning to
declare itself, and he and the major, couched like squirrels in their
leafy covert, laughed quietly to themselves at the baffled searchers,
while they ate their bread and cheese with fresh appetites.

When night had fallen they left the tree, and the prince, parting with
his late companion, sought a neighboring house where he was promised
shelter in one of those hiding-places provided for proscribed priests.
Here he found Lord Wilmot, one of the officers who had escaped with him
from the fatal field of Worcester, and who had left him at Whiteladies.

It is too much to tell in detail all the movements that followed. The
search for Prince Charles continued with unrelenting severity. Daily,
noble and plebeian officers of the defeated army were seized. The
country was being scoured, high and low. Frequently the prince saw the
forms or heard the voices of those who sought him diligently. But "Will
Jones," the woodman, was not easily to be recognized as Charles Stuart,
the prince. He was dressed in the shabbiest of weather-worn suits, his
hair cut short to his ears, his face embrowned, his head covered with an
old and greasy gray steeple hat, with turned-up brims, his ungloved and
stained hands holding for cane a long and crooked thorn-stick.
Altogether it was a very unprincely individual who roamed those
peril-haunted shires of England.

The two fugitives--Prince Charles and Lord Wilmot--now turned their
steps towards the seaport of Bristol, hoping there to find means of
passage to France. Their last place of refuge in Staffordshire was at
the house of Colonel Lane, of Bently, an earnest royalist. Here Charles
dropped his late name, and assumed that of Will Jackson. He threw off
his peasant's garb, put on the livery of a servant, and set off on
horseback with his seeming mistress, Miss Jane Lane, sister of the
colonel, who had suddenly become infected with the desire of visiting a
cousin at Abbotsleigh, near Bristol. The prince had now become a lady's
groo