For a year we saw no more of our brother, and received of him only two letters (for he hated penwork), the both very cheerful.  Yet within a month of his going, on a still clear day in January, we listened together to the noise of a pitched battle in which he was fighting, a short six miles from us as the crow flies.  I have often admired how men who were happily born too late to witness the troubles of those times will make their own pictures of warfare, as though it changed at once the whole face of the country and tenour of folk’s lives; whereas it would be raging two valleys away and men upon their own farms ploughing to the tune of it, with nothing seen by them then or afterwards; or it would leap suddenly across the hills, filling the roads with cursing weary men, and roll by, leaving a sharp track of ruin for the eye to follow and remember it by.  So on this afternoon, when Hopton and the Cornish troops were engaging and defeating Ruthen on Braddock Down, Margery and I counted the rattles of musketry borne down to us on the still reaches of the river and, climbing to the earthwork past the field where old Will Retallack stuck to his ploughing with an army of gulls following and wheeling about him as usual, spied the smoke rolling over the edge of Boconnoc woodland to the north-east; but never a soldier we saw that day or for months after.

A little before the end of the day the rebel army broke and began to roll back through Liskeard and towards the passes of the Tamar, and Mark followed with his troops to Saltash, into Devonshire, and as far as Chagford, where he rode by Mr. Sydney Godolphin in the skirmish which gave that valiant young gentleman his mortal wound.  Soon after the whole of the King’s forces retired upon Tavistock, where a truce was patched up between the opposing factions in the West.  But this did not release Mark, who was kept at duty on the border until May—­when the strife burst out again—­and joined the pursuit after Stratton Heath.  Thereafter he fought at Lansdowne, and in the operations against Bristol, and later in the same year, having won a cornetcy in the King’s Horse, bore his part in the many brisk expeditions led by Hopton through Dorsetshire and Hampshire into Sussex.

’Twas from Worthing he came back to us a few days before Christmas, and his mission was to beat up recruits for his troop in the season of slackness before the Spring campaign.  He had grown almost two inches, his chest was fuller, his voice manly, and his handsome face not spoiled (Margery declared it improved) by a scar across the cheek, won in a raid upon Poole.  He had borne himself gallantly, and our prayers had prevailed with God to save him from serious hurt even in the furious charge at Lansdowne, when of two thousand horse no more than six hundred reached the crest of the hill.  He greeted us all lovingly and made no disguise of his joy to be at home again, though but on a short furlough.