--for so I
at least would call it, though people accustomed to the law may take a
different view of it--we had news of a thing far worse, which turned the
hearts of our women sick. This I will tell in most careful language, so
as to give offence to none, if skill of words may help it.*

* The following story is strictly true; and true it is that
the country-people rose, to a man, at this dastard cruelty,
and did what the Government failed to do.--Ed. L.D.

Mistress Margery Badcock, a healthy and upright young woman, with a
good rich colour, and one of the finest hen-roosts anywhere round our
neighbourhood, was nursing her child about six of the clock, and
looking out for her husband. Now this child was too old to be nursed, as
everybody told her; for he could run, say two yards alone, and perhaps
four or five, by holding to handles. And he had a way of looking round,
and spreading his legs, and laughing, with his brave little body well
fetched up, after a desperate journey to the end of the table, which
his mother said nothing could equal. Nevertheless, he would come to
be nursed, as regular as a clock, almost; and, inasmuch as he was
the first, both father and mother made much of him; for God only knew
whether they could ever compass such another one.

Christopher Badcock was a tenant farmer, in the parish of Martinhoe,
renting some fifty acres of land, with a right of common attached to
them; and at this particular time, being now the month of February,
and fine open weather, he was hard at work ploughing and preparing for
spring corn. Therefore his wife was not surprised although the dusk
was falling, that farmer Christopher should be at work in "blind man's
holiday," as we call it.

But she was surprised, nay astonished, when by the light of the kitchen
fire (brightened up for her husband), she saw six or seven great armed
men burst into the room upon her; and she screamed so that the maid in
the back kitchen heard her, but was afraid to come to help. Two of the
strongest and fiercest men at once seized poor young Margery; and though
she fought for her child and home, she was but an infant herself in
their hands. In spite of tears, and shrieks, and struggles, they tore
the babe from the mother's arms, and cast it on the lime ash floor; then
they bore her away to their horses (for by this time she was senseless),
and telling the others to sack the house, rode off with their prize to
the valley. And