sooner or
later; but for long there were no tidings of the _Ouseburn Lassie_.
The Blacketts did what they could to console the bereaved parents, but
father and mother would not be comforted. At length, months
afterwards, they learnt in a casual way that a collier had been
captured off Yarmouth by a French privateer, about the time the
_Ouseburn Lassie_ was making her trip; at least that was the
construction the Yarmouth salts who saw the affair from the shore put
upon the movements of the two vessels. So a ray of hope came to
Fairburn and his wife.

"The lad will be somewhere in a French prison," the father said, "and
some day he will be set free and come home to us again."

The spring of 1703 brought Matthew Blackett's seventeenth birthday,
and with it an ensign's commission in a well-reputed regiment of foot.
He already stood six feet one in his stockings, and mighty proud he
felt when his lanky figure was clothed in his gay uniform.

"Perhaps I shall come across George in my wanderings," he said, when
he went to bid a very friendly adieu to the Fairburns. "Won't it be
jolly if we do meet!" And the parents were constrained to smile in
spite of their sadness.

One of the commonest subjects of conversation in our days is the state
of "political parties," and every child of school age can tell you
which is "the party in power." Three hundred years ago such
expressions would not have been understood at all, in their modern
sense, and "government by party" was a thing as yet undreamed of.
Usually the strongest man of his time, whether sovereign or subject,
was the real ruler in England. Elizabeth, for instance, was the sole
mistress in her own realm, though even she was greatly helped by the
famous minister Burleigh. In later times a Strafford, a Laud, an
Oliver Cromwell, a Clarendon presided over the destinies of England.

But in the second half of the seventeenth century there began that
division of politicians into two sides or parties which has continued
ever since. This division sprang, no doubt, from the civil wars
between King and Parliament, between Cavalier and Roundhead. By the
times of Queen Anne the terms Whig and Tory, replaced in our days for
the most part by Liberal and Conservative, had come into common use,
and no one who desires to understand the history of her reign can
wholly neglect the movements of these two opposing parties in
politics. For Marlborough--with his wife--may be said to be the last