Page:Traditional Tales of the English and Scottish Peasantry - 1887.djvu/92

88 explain. As they began to gather round, not unobserved by the sons of Mars, some of the village matrons proceeded to remonstrate. "Wherefore gaze ye on the men with whiskers, pruned and landered, and with coats of scarlet, and with lace laid on the skirts thereof?" said one old woman, pulling at the same time her reluctant niece by the hand, while her eyes, notwithstanding her retrograde motion, were fixed on a brawny trooper. "And, Deborah," said a mother to her daughter, whose white hand and whiter neck, shaded with tresses of glossy auburn, the hands of another trooper had invaded, "what wouldst thou do with him who wears the helmet of brass upon his head? He is an able-bodied man, but a great covenant-breaker, and he putteth trust in the spear and in the sword." The maiden struggled with that earnestness with which a virgin of eighteen strives to escape from the kindness of a handsome man; and kiss succeeding kiss told what penalty she incurred in delaying to follow her mother.

Of the dissenting portion of the multitude, some disposed of themselves in the readiest ale-houses, where the themes of patronage, free-will, and predestination, emptied many barrels, and the clouds of mystery and doubt darkened down with the progress of the tankard. Others, of a more flexible system of morality, went to arrange, far from the tumult of tongues and opinions in which the district gauger figured, a midnight importation of choice Geneva, the rapid consumption of which was hastened by the burning spark of controversy which raged unquenchably in their throats. Many retired sullenly homeward, lamenting that a concourse of men of hostile opinions could collect, controvert, and quarrel, and then coolly separate without blows and bloodshed, cursing the monotony of human existence now, compared with the stirring times of Border forays and Covenant raids. A moiety nearly of the seceding crowd remained in clumps on the village green. They were men chiefly of that glowing zeal to whom mere charity and the silent operations of religious feeling seem cold and unfruitful; those pure and fortunate beings who find nothing praiseworthy, or meriting the hope of salvation, in the actions of mere men; who discover new interpretations of Scripture, and rend anew the party-coloured and patched garments of sect and schism every time they meet, when the liquor is abundant. Their hope of the complete reform in the