So then my lady was consigned to her coach, and sent off to Hexton, with her woman and the man of law to bear her company, a couple of troopers riding on either side of the coach.  And Harry was left behind at the Hall, belonging as it were to nobody, and quite alone in the world.  The captain and a guard of men remained in possession there; and the soldiers, who were very good-natured and kind, ate my lord’s mutton and drank his wine, and made themselves comfortable, as they well might do in such pleasant quarters.

The captains had their dinner served in my lord’s tapestry parlor, and poor little Harry thought his duty was to wait upon Captain Westbury’s chair, as his custom had been to serve his lord when he sat there.

After the departure of the Countess, Dick the Scholar took Harry Esmond under his special protection, and would examine him in his humanities and talk to him both of French and Latin, in which tongues the lad found, and his new friend was willing enough to acknowledge, that he was even more proficient than Scholar Dick.  Hearing that he had learned them from a Jesuit, in the praise of whom and whose goodness Harry was never tired of speaking, Dick, rather to the boy’s surprise, who began to have an early shrewdness, like many children bred up alone, showed a great deal of theological science, and knowledge of the points at issue between the two churches; so that he and Harry would have hours of controversy together, in which the boy was certainly worsted by the arguments of this singular trooper.  “I am no common soldier,” Dick would say, and indeed it was easy to see by his learning, breeding, and many accomplishments, that he was not.  “I am of one of the most ancient families in the empire; I have had my education at a famous school, and a famous university; I learned my first rudiments of Latin near to Smithfield, in London, where the martyrs were roasted.”

“You hanged as many of ours,” interposed Harry; “and, for the matter of persecution, Father Holt told me that a young gentleman of Edinburgh, eighteen years of age, student at the college there, was hanged for heresy only last year, though he recanted, and solemnly asked pardon for his errors.”

“Faith! there has been too much persecution on both sides:  but ’twas you taught us.”

“Nay, ’twas the Pagans began it,” cried the lad, and began to instance a number of saints of the Church, from the proto-martyr downwards—­“this one’s fire went out under him:  that one’s oil cooled in the caldron:  at a third holy head the executioner chopped three times and it would not come off.  Show us martyrs in your church for whom such miracles have been done.”