According to the who told me the story, Christopher Swetman’s house, on the of King’s-Hintock village, was in those days larger and better kept than when, many years later, it was sold to the lord of the adjoining; after having been in the Swetman family, as one may say, since the Conquest.  
Some people would have it to be that the thing happened at the house opposite, belonging to one Childs, with whose family the Swetmans afterwards intermarried.  But that it was at the original homestead of the Swetmans can be shown in various ways; chiefly by the unbroken traditions of the family, and by the evidence of the walls themselves, which are the only ones thereabout with windows mullioned in the Elizabethan manner, and plainly of a date to the event; while those of the other house might well have been fifty or eighty years later, and probably were; since the choice of Swetman’s house by the was doubtless by no other circumstance than its then suitable loneliness.
 
It was a cloudy July morning just before dawn, the hour of two having been struck by Swetman’s one-handed clock on the stairs, that is still preserved in the family.  Christopher heard the strokes from his , immediately at the top of the staircase, and overlooking the front of the house.  He did not wonder that he was .  The and excitements which had latterly stirred the neighbourhood, to the effect that the rightful King of England had landed from Holland, at a port only eighteen miles to the south-west of Swetman’s house, were enough to make wakeful and anxious even a yeoman like him.  Some of the villagers, by the news, had thrown down their , and rushed to the ranks of the .  Christopher Swetman had weighed both sides of the question, and had remained at home.
 
Now as he lay thinking of these and other things he fancied that he could hear the footfall of a man on the road leading up to his house—a byway, which led scarce anywhere else; and therefore a tread was at any time more apt to startle the of the homestead than if it had stood in a thoroughfare.  The footfall came opposite the gate, and stopped there.  One minute, two minutes passed, and the pedestrian did not proceed.  Christopher Swetman got out of bed, and opened the .  ‘Hoi! who’s there?’ cries he.
 
‘A friend,’ came from the darkness.
 
‘And what ye want at this time o’ night?’ says Swetman.
 
‘Shelter.  I’ve lost my way.’
 
‘What’s thy name?’
 
There came no answer.
 
‘Be ye one of King Monmouth’s men?’
 
‘He that asks no questions will hear no lies from me.  I am a stranger; and I am spent, and hungered.  Can you let me lie with you to-night?’
 
Swetman was generous to people in trouble, and his house was roomy.  ‘Wait a bit,’ he said, ‘and I’ll come down and have a look at thee, anyhow.’
 
He struck a light, put on his clothes, and , taking his horn-lantern from a nail in the passage, and it before opening the door.  The rays fell on the form of a tall, dark man in accoutrements and wearing a sword.  He was pale with and covered with mud, though the weather was dry.
 
‘Prithee take no of my appearance,’ said the stranger.  ‘But let me in.’
 
That his visitor was in sore admitted of no doubt, and the yeoman’s natural humanity assisted the other’s sad and gentle voice.  Swetman took him in, not without a suspicion that this man represented in some way Monmouth’s cause, to which he was not unfriendly in his secret heart.  At his earnest request the new-comer was given a suit of the yeoman’s old clothes in exchange for his own, which, with his sword, were hidden in a closet in Swetman’s chamber; food was then put before him and a provided for him in a room at the back.
 
Here he slept till quite late in the morning, which was Sunday, the sixth of July, and when he came down in the garments that he had borrowed he met the household with a smile.  Besides Swetman himself, there were only his two daughters, Grace and Leonard (the latter was, oddly enough, a woman’s name here), and both had been to .  They asked no questions and received no information; though the stranger regarded their fair with an interest almost too deep.  Having partaken of their usual breakfast of ham and cider he weariness and to the chamber whence he had come.
 
In a couple of hours or thereabout he came down again, the two young women having now gone off to morning service.  Seeing Christopher about the house without assistance, he asked if he could do anything to aid his host.
 
As he seemed anxious to hide all differences and appear as one of themselves, Swetman set him to get vegetables from the garden and fetch water from Buttock’s Spring in the dip near the house (though the spring was not called by that name till years after, by the way).
 
‘And what can I do next?’ says the stranger when these services had been performed.
 
His and struck Christopher much, and won upon him.  ‘Since you be minded to,’ says the latter, ‘you can take down the dishes and spread the table for dinner.  Take a pewter plate for thyself, but the trenchers will do for we.’
 
But the other would not, and took a trencher likewise, in doing which he of the two girls and remarked how they were.
 
This quietude was put an end to by a stir out of doors, which was sufficient to draw Swetman’s attention to it, and he went out.  Farm hands who had gone off and joined the Duke on his arrival had begun to come in with news that a midnight battle had been fought on the to the north, the Duke’s men, who had attacked, being worsted; the Duke himself, with one or two lords and other friends, had fled, no one knew whither.
 
‘There has been a battle,’ says Swetman, on coming indoors after these tidings, and looking earnestly at the stranger.
 
‘May the victory be to the rightful in the end, whatever the issue now,’ says the other, with a sorrowful sigh.
 
‘Dost really know nothing about it?’ said Christopher.  ‘I could have sworn you was one from that very battle!’
 
‘I was here before three o’ the clock this morning; and these men have only arrived now.’
 
‘True,’ said the yeoman.  ‘But still, I think—’
 
‘Do not press your question,’ the stranger urged.  ‘I am in a strait, and can refuse a helper nothing; such is, therefore, unfair.’
 
‘True again,’ said Swetman, and held his tongue.
 
The daughters of the house returned from church, where the service had been hurried by reason of the excitement.  To their father’s questioning if they had spoken of him who sojourned there they replied that they had said never a word; which, indeed, was true, as events proved.
 
He bade them serve the dinner; and, as the visitor had since the news of the battle, prepared to take a platter to him upstairs.  But he preferred to come down and dine with the family.
 
During the afternoon more passed through the village, but Christopher Swetman, his visitor, and his family kept indoors.  In the evening, however, Swetman came out from his gate, and, harkening in silence to these tidings and more, wondered what might be in store for him for his last night’s work.
 
He returned homeward by a path across the that skirted his own .  Passing here, he heard the voice of his daughter Leonard expostulating inside the hedge, her words being: ‘Don’t ye, sir; don’t!  I prithee let me go!’
 
‘Why, sweetheart?’
 
‘Because I’ve a-promised another!’
 
Peeping through, as he could not help doing, he saw the girl struggling in the arms of the stranger, who was attempting to kiss her; but finding her resistance to be genuine, and her distress unfeigned, he reluctantly let her go.
 
Swetman’s face grew dark, for his girls were more to him than himself.  He hastened on, all the way.  He entered the gate, and made straight for the orchard.  When he reached it his da............