triangular patch of green before the
door of the White Hart, and Colonel Kirke conceived the quite facetious
notion of converting this advertisement of hospitality into a gallows--a
signpost of temporal welfare into a signpost of eternity. So forth he
fetched the prisoners he had brought in chains from Bridgwater, and
proceeded, without any form of trial whatsoever, to string them up
before the inn. The story runs that as they were hoisted to that
improvised gibbet, Kirke and his officers, standing at the windows,
raised their glasses to pledge their happy deliverance; then, when
the victims began to kick convulsively, Kirke would order the drums
to strike up, so that the gentlemen might have music for their better
dancing.

The colonel, you see, was a humorist, as humour was then understood upon
the northern shores of Africa, where he had been schooled.

When, eventually, Colonel Kirke was recalled and reprimanded, it was not
because of his barbarities many of which transcend the possibilities of
decent print--but because of a lenity which this venal gentleman began
to display when he discovered that many of his victims were willing to
pay handsomely for mercy.

Meanwhile, under his reign of terror, men who had cause to fear the
terrible hand of the King's vengeance went into hiding wherever they
could. Among those who escaped into Hampshire, thinking themselves safer
in a county that had not participated in the war, were a dissenting
parson named George Hicks, who had been in Monmouth's army, and a lawyer
named Richard Nelthorp, outlawed for participation in the Rye House
Plot. In his desperate quest for shelter, Hicks bethought him of the
charitable Nonconformist lady of Moyle's Court, the widow of that John
Lisle who had been one of Cromwell's Lords Commissioners of the Great
Seal, and most active in bringing King Charles I to justice.

John Lisle had fled to Switzerland at the Restoration; but Stuart
vengeance had followed him, set a price upon his head, and procured
his murder at Lausanne. That was twenty years ago. Since then his lady,
because she was known to have befriended and sheltered many Royalists,
and because she had some stout Tory friends to plead for her, was
allowed to remain in tranquil possession of her estates. And there the
Lady Alice Lisle--so called by courtesy, since Cromwell's titles did not
at law survive the Restoration--might have ended her days in peace, but
that it was written that t