However he left me to do it, while he made himself comfortable:  and in truth the horse required care; he was blown so that he could hardly stand, and plastered with mud, and steaming so that the stable was quite full with it.  By the time I had put the poor fellow to rights, his master had finished dinner, and was in a more pleasant humour, having even offered to kiss Annie, out of pure gratitude, as he said; but Annie answered with spirit that gratitude must not be shown by increasing the obligation.  Jeremy made reply to this that his only way to be grateful then was to tell us his story:  and so he did, at greater length than I can here repeat it; for it does not bear particularly upon Lorna’s fortunes.

It appears that as he was riding towards us from the town of Southmolton in Devonshire, he found the roads very soft and heavy, and the floods out in all directions; but met with no other difficulty until he came to Landacre Bridge.  He had only a single trooper with him, a man not of the militia but of the King’s army, whom Jeremy had brought from Exeter.  As these two descended towards the bridge they observed that both the Kensford water and the River Barle were pouring down in mighty floods from the melting of the snow.  So great indeed was the torrent, after they united, that only the parapets of the bridge could be seen above the water, the road across either bank being covered and very deep on the hither side.  The trooper did not like the look of it, and proposed to ride back again, and round by way of Simonsbath, where the stream is smaller.  But Stickles would not have it so, and dashing into the river, swam his horse for the bridge, and gained it with some little trouble; and there he found the water not more than up to his horse’s knees perhaps.  On the crown of the bridge he turned his horse to watch the trooper’s passage, and to help him with directions; when suddenly he saw him fall headlong into the torrent, and heard the report of a gun from behind, and felt a shock to his own body, such as lifted him out of the saddle.  Turning round he beheld three men, risen up from behind the hedge on one side of his onward road, two of them ready to load again, and one with his gun unfired, waiting to get good aim at him.  Then Jeremy did a gallant thing, for which I doubt whether I should have had the presence of mind in danger.  He saw that to swim his horse back again would be almost certain death; as affording such a target, where even a wound must be fatal.  Therefore he struck the spurs into the nag, and rode through the water straight at the man who was pointing the long gun at him.  If the horse had been carried off his legs, there must have been an end of Jeremy; for the other men were getting ready to have another shot at him.  But luckily the horse galloped right on without any need for swimming, being himself excited, no doubt, by all he had seen and heard of it.  And Jeremy lay almost flat on his neck, so as to give