t above
all, I'll never forget the way in which Jack drove from the table that
native who hadn't a clean shirt on. It was a picture of Christ's parable
of the 'Marriage Feast,'" she added softly.

Before I could reply the gong, strengthened by Jack's imperative "Hurry
up, I'm starving," summoned us to dinner.

[Sidenote: A story of Sedgemoor times and of a woman who was both a
saint and a heroine.]

My Mistress Elizabeth

BY

ANNIE ARMITT

I committed a great folly when I was young and ignorant; for I left my
father's house and hid myself in London only that I might escape the
match he desired to make for me. I knew nothing at that time of the
dangers and sorrows of those who live in the world and are mixed in its
affairs.

Yet it was a time of public peril, and not a few who dwelt in the quiet
corners of the earth found themselves embroiled suddenly in great
matters of state. For when the Duke of Monmouth landed in Dorsetshire it
was not the dwellers in great cities or the intriguers of the Court that
followed him chiefly to their undoing; it was the peasant who left his
plough and the cloth-worker his loom. Men who could neither read nor
write were caught up by the cry of a Protestant leader, and went after
him to their ruin.

The prince to whose standard they flocked was, for all his sweet and
taking manners, but a profligate at best; he had no true religion in his
heart--nothing but a desire, indeed, for his own aggrandisement,
whatever he might say to the unhappy maid that handed a Bible to him at
Taunton. But of this the people were ignorant, and so it came to pass
that they were led to destruction in a fruitless cause.

[Sidenote: French Leave]

But there were, besides the men that died nobly in a mistaken struggle
for religious freedom, others that joined the army from mean and ignoble
motives, and others again that had not the courage to go through with
that which they had begun, but turned coward and traitor at the last.

Of one of them I am now to write, and I will say of him no more evil
than must be.

How I, that had fled away from the part of the country where this
trouble was, before its beginning, became mixed in it was strange
enough.

I had, as I said, run away to escape from the match that my father
proposed for me; and yet it was not from any dislike of Tom Windham, the
neighbour's son with whom I was to have mated, that I did this; but
chiefly from a dislike that I had to