prisoners and placed in the Tower of London.  Penruddocke was examined personally by Cromwell at Whitehall, and it was thought for a time that he might be pardoned, but ultimately he was sent to the scaffold.  He compared the steps leading up to the scaffold to Jacob’s ladder, the feet on earth but the top reaching to heaven; and taking off his doublet he said, “I am putting off these old rags of mine to be clad with the new robes of the righteousness of Jesus Christ.”  The farewell letters between him and his wife were full of tenderness and love, and what he had done was doubtless under the inspiration of strong religious convictions.  It was said that it was his insurrection that led to the division of the country into military districts, which have continued ever since.  The lace cap he wore on the scaffold, blood-stained and showing the marks of the axe, was still preserved, as well as his sword, and the beautiful letters that passed between him and his wife, and the Colonel’s portrait was still to be seen at the mansion.

About a mile before reaching Shaftesbury we left Wiltshire and entered the county of Dorset, of which Shaftesbury was said to be the most interesting town from an antiquarian point of view.  Here the downs terminate abruptly, leaving the town standing 700 feet above the sea level on the extreme point, with precipices on three sides.  Across the far-famed Blackmoor Vale we could quite easily see Stourton Tower, standing on the top of Kingsettle Hill, although it was twelve miles distant.  The tower marked the spot where, in 879, King Alfred raised his standard against the Danes, and was built in 1766, the inscription on it reading: 

Alfred the Great A.D. 879 on this summit erected his standard against Danish invaders.  To him we owe the origin of Juries, the establishment of a Militia, the creation of a Naval Force.  Alfred, the light of a benighted age, was a Philosopher, and a Christian, the father of his people, the founder of the English monarchy and liberty.

In the gardens near that tower the three counties of Dorset, Somerset, and Wilts meet; and here in a grotto, where the water runs from a jar under the arm of a figure of Neptune, rises the River Stour, whose acquaintance we were to form later in its sixty-mile run through Dorset.

Shaftesbury had been a stronghold from the earliest times, and so long ago, according to Geoffrey of Monmouth, who was born A.D. 1100, that an Eagle spoke to the people who were building the walls words that even he dare not write.  Elgiva, the queen of the Saxon King Edward the Elder, was buried in the Abbey at Shaftesbury, as were also the remains of Edward the Martyr, who was murdered by Elfrida his step-mother in 980.  When the bones of this canonised king began to work miraculous cures, there was a rush of pilgrims to the town, which at one time contained twelve churches.  King Canute, it was stated, died here in 1035; and in 1313 Elizabeth, the wife of Robert Bruce of Scotland, was brought to the Abbey as a prisoner.  The building was demolished in the time of Henry VIII, all that remained of it being what is known as the old Abbey wall.