o serve his lord when he sat there.

After the departure of the Countess, Dick the Scholar took Harry Esmond
under his special protection, and would examine him in his humanities
and talk to him both of French and Latin, in which tongues the lad
found, and his new friend was willing enough to acknowledge, that he was
even more proficient than Scholar Dick. Hearing that he had learned them
from a Jesuit, in the praise of whom and whose goodness Harry was never
tired of speaking, Dick, rather to the boy's surprise, who began to have
an early shrewdness, like many children bred up alone, showed a great
deal of theological science, and knowledge of the points at issue
between the two churches; so that he and Harry would have hours of
controversy together, in which the boy was certainly worsted by the
arguments of this singular trooper. "I am no common soldier," Dick would
say, and indeed it was easy to see by his learning, breeding, and
many accomplishments, that he was not. "I am of one of the most ancient
families in the empire; I have had my education at a famous school,
and a famous university; I learned my first rudiments of Latin near to
Smithfield, in London, where the martyrs were roasted."

"You hanged as many of ours," interposed Harry; "and, for the matter of
persecution, Father Holt told me that a young gentleman of Edinburgh,
eighteen years of age, student at the college there, was hanged for
heresy only last year, though he recanted, and solemnly asked pardon for
his errors."

"Faith! there has been too much persecution on both sides: but 'twas you
taught us."

"Nay, 'twas the Pagans began it," cried the lad, and began to instance
a number of saints of the Church, from the proto-martyr downwards--"this
one's fire went out under him: that one's oil cooled in the caldron: at
a third holy head the executioner chopped three times and it would not
come off. Show us martyrs in YOUR church for whom such miracles have
been done."

"Nay," says the trooper gravely, "the miracles of the first three
centuries belong to my Church as well as yours, Master Papist," and then
added, with something of a smile upon his countenance, and a queer look
at Harry--"And yet, my little catechiser, I have sometimes thought about
those miracles, that there was not much good in them, since the victim's
head always finished by coming off at the third or fourth chop, and the
caldron, if it did not boil one day, boiled the next. Howbeit,