crowd groaned at her; but Mr. Blick
stopped them, calling the husband, who was in a sad state of drunken
vainglory, to leave the ranks in which he tried to march. "We don't want
fathers of families," he cried. "We want these tight young bachelors.
They're the boys." Indeed, the tight young bachelors felt that this was
the case, so the woman got her man again; lucky she was to get him. As
far as I could judge, the crowd imagined us to be great officers; at
any rate our coming drew away the listeners from the waggon. They came
flocking to our heels as though we were the Duke himself. A drummer beat
up a quickstep; the crowd surged forward. We marched across the fields
to Lyme, five hundred strong. One of the men, plucking a sprig of
hawthorn from the hedge, asked me to wear it in my hat as the Duke's
badge, which I did. He called me "Captain." "Captain," he said. "We had
a brush with them already, this morning, along the road here. Two on 'em
were killed. They didn't stay for no more." So fighting had begun then,
the civil war had taken its first fruits of life. There could be no more
shillyshallying; we had put our hands to a big business. In spite of
the noise of the march, my spirits were rather dashed by the thought
of those two men, lying dead somewhere on the road behind us, killed by
their own countrymen.

We are said to be a sober people; but none of those who saw Lyme that
morning would have had much opinion of our sobriety. Charmouth had been
disorderly; Lyme was uproarious. Outside the town, in one of the fields
above the church, we were stopped by a guard of men who all wore white
scarves on their arms, as well as green sprays in their hats. They
stopped us, apparently, because their captain wished to exercise them
in military customs. They were evidently raw to the use of arms. They
handled their muskets like spades. "Be you for Monmouth, masters?" they
asked us, grinning. When we said that we were, this very unmilitary
guard told us to pass on. "Her've got arms for all," they said. "The
word be 'Fear nothing but God.'" Some of them joked with friends among
our party. They waved their muskets to us.

CHAPTER XVI. THE LANDING

Inside the town, there was great confusion. Riotous men were foraging,
that is, plundering from private houses, pretending that they did so at
the Duke's orders. The streets were full of people, nearly all of them
men, the green boughs in their hats. On the beach two long lines of