pleasure, or laid it down at a more earnest moment, to hear the
stirring anecdotes of Oliver; how he looked; how he spoke and commanded!
What unwritten histories the pastor must have learned of Strafford,--of
Laud,--of Pym pouncing on his quarry,--of how the narrator felt, when he
sat as a regicide judge,--and of that right royal face which he had
confronted without relenting, with all its combined expressions, of
resignation and resolution, of kingly dignity and Christian submission.

Time went on, and the Hadley regicides wasted away in their cellar,
while Dixwell thus flourished like a bay-tree in green old age. A letter
from Goffe, to his "mother Goldsmith," written in August, 1674, of which
a copy is preserved, shows that years had been doing their work on the
once bold and stalwart Whalley. "Your old friend Mr. R.," he says, using
the feigned initial, "is yet living, but continues in that weak
condition. He is scarce capable of any rational discourse (his
understanding, memory, and speech, doth so much fail him,) and seems not
to take much notice of any thing ... and it's a great mercy to him, that
he hath a friend that takes pleasure in being helpful to him ... for
though my help be but poor and weak, yet that ancient servant of Christ
could not well subsist without it. The Lord help us to profit by all,
and to wait with patience upon him, till we shall see what end he will
make with us."

Boys grew to be men, and little girls marriageable women, while they
thus dwelt in the cellar; and the people of Hadley passed in and out of
their pastor's door, and doubled and trebled in number around his house,
and not a soul dreamed that such inhabitants lived amongst them. This
remarkable privacy accounts for the historical fact, given as a story in
"Peveril of the Peak."[45] It occurred during the war of King Philip, in
1675, the year following the date of Goffe's letter, and when Whalley
must have been far gone in his decline, so that he could not have been
the hero, as is so dramatically asserted by Bridgenorth to Julian
Peveril. It was a fast day among the settlers, who were imploring God
for deliverance from an expected attack of the savages; and they were
all assembled in their rude little meeting-house, around which sentinels
were kept on patrol. The house of the pastor was only a few rods
distant; and probably, through the miserable panes that let in all the
sun-light of their cellar, Goffe watched the invasion of