the other of eluding a wrongful demand.  For instance (says he), suppose a good citizen, who had seen his Majesty take refuge there, had been asked, “Is King Charles up that oak-tree?” his duty would have been not to say, Yes—­so that the Cromwellians should seize the king and murder him like his father—­but No; his Majesty being private in the tree, and therefore not to be seen there by loyal eyes:  all which instruction, in religion and morals, as well as in the rudiments of the tongues and sciences, the boy took eagerly and with gratitude from his tutor.  When, then, Holt was gone, and told Harry not to see him, it was as if he had never been.  And he had this answer pat when he came to be questioned a few days after.

The Prince of Orange was then at Salisbury, as young Esmond learned from seeing Doctor Tusher in his best cassock (though the roads were muddy, and he never was known to wear his silk, only his stuff one, a-horseback), with a great orange cockade in his broad-leafed hat, and Nahum, his clerk, ornamented with a like decoration.  The Doctor was walking up and down in front of his parsonage, when little Esmond saw him, and heard him say he was going to pay his duty to his Highness the Prince, as he mounted his pad and rode away with Nahum behind.  The village people had orange cockades too, and his friend the blacksmith’s laughing daughter pinned one into Harry’s old hat, which he tore out indignantly when they bade him to cry “God save the Prince of Orange and the Protestant religion!” but the people only laughed, for they liked the boy in the village, where his solitary condition moved the general pity, and where he found friendly welcomes and faces in many houses.  Father Holt had many friends there too, for he not only would fight the blacksmith at theology, never losing his temper, but laughing the whole time in his pleasant way; but he cured him of an ague with quinquina, and was always ready with a kind word for any man that asked it, so that they said in the village ’twas a pity the two were Papists.

The Director and the Vicar of Castlewood agreed very well; indeed, the former was a perfectly-bred gentleman, and it was the latter’s business to agree with everybody.  Doctor Tusher and the lady’s-maid, his spouse, had a boy who was about the age of little Esmond; and there was such a friendship between the lads, as propinquity and tolerable kindness and good-humor on either side would be pretty sure to occasion.  Tom Tusher was sent off early, however, to a school in London, whither his father took him and a volume of sermons, in the first year of the reign of King James; and Tom returned but once, a year afterwards, to Castlewood for many years of his scholastic and collegiate life.  Thus there was less danger to Tom of a perversion of his faith by the Director, who scarce ever saw him, than there was to Harry, who constantly was in the Vicar’s company; but as long as Harry’s religion was his Majesty’s, and my lord’s, and my lady’s, the Doctor said gravely, it should not be for him to disturb or disquiet him:  it was far from him to say that his Majesty’s Church was not a branch of the Catholic Church; upon which Father Holt used, according to his custom, to laugh, and say that the Holy Church throughout all the world, and the noble Army of Martyrs, were very much obliged to the Doctor.