not so learned his duty. "Who goes there?--Stand,
friend--stand; or, verily, I will shoot thee to death!" were challenges
which followed each other quick, the last being enforced by the
levelling and presenting the said long-barrelled gun with which he was
armed.

"Why, what a murrain!" answered Lance. "Is it your fashion to
go a-shooting at this time o' night? Why, this is but a time for
bat-fowling."

"Nay, but hark thee, friend," said the experienced sentinel, "I am none
of those who do this work negligently. Thou canst not snare me with thy
crafty speech, though thou wouldst make it to sound simple in mine ear.
Of a verity I will shoot, unless thou tell thy name and business."

"Name!" said Lance; "why, what a dickens should it be but Robin
Round--honest Robin of Redham; and for business, an you must needs know,
I come on a message from some Parliament man, up yonder at the Castle,
with letters for worshipful Master Bridgenorth of Moultrassie Hall; and
this be the place, as I think; though why ye be marching up and down at
his door, like the sign of a Red Man, with your old firelock there, I
cannot so well guess."

"Give me the letters, my friend," said the sentinel, to whom this
explanation seemed very natural and probable, "and I will cause them
forthwith to be delivered into his worship's own hand."

Rummaging in his pockets, as if to pull out the letters which never
existed, Master Lance approached within the sentinel's piece, and,
before he was aware, suddenly seized him by the collar, whistled sharp
and shrill, and exerting his skill as a wrestler, for which he had been
distinguished in his youth, he stretched his antagonist on his back--the
musket for which they struggled going off in the fall.

The miners rushed into the courtyard at Lance's signal; and hopeless any
longer of prosecuting his design in silence, Lance commanded two of them
to secure the prisoner, and the rest to cheer loudly, and attack the
door of the house. Instantly the courtyard of the mansion rang with
the cry of "Peveril of the Peak for ever!" with all the abuse which the
Royalists had invented to cast upon the Roundheads, during so many years
of contention; and at the same time, while some assailed the door with
their mining implements, others directed their attack against the angle,
where a kind of porch joined to the main front of the building; and
there, in some degree protected by the projection of the wall, and of a
balcony