for her sweet smiting. And as I had of old time licked every lad in
Stafford, so now neither Staffordshire nor all the King's men in it should
turn me back. Through she should go, and in safety and comfort, so that
when the time came for me to hand over my precious charge to a worthier,
she should say that the yokel had done a man's work and done it
gentlemanly. Therefore, when Mistress Waynflete looked up to me from the
bleak uplands with serious, questioning eyes, I said, as calmly as if we
were pacing the garden at the Hanyards, with Kate and Jane active in the
kitchen behind us, "Ham and eggs for breakfast!"

"I don't see any," she said, in answering mood, scanning the fields
around us. "Not that that matters. I didn't see the steps, but they were
there. You make me think, Master Wheatman, of a Turk I saw in a booth at
Vienna, who drew rabbits and rose-bushes out of an empty hat.
Staffordshire is your conjurer's hat. And I do like ham and eggs."

My assurance and her comfortable belief in it made us both brighter, and
we stepped out merrily. She gave me an entertaining account of Vienna,
where she had spent some months, and which was then the great outpost of
Christendom against the Turk. When this talk had brought us on to the
field of Hopton Heath, I gave her the best account I could of the battle
there in the Civil War time, and of the slaying of the Marquis of
Northampton. And this led me on to my pride of ancestry, and I told her of
Captain Smite-and-spare-not Wheatman, a tower of strength to the
Parliament in these parts, who fought here and later on Naseby Field
itself. Many tales I told of him that had been handed down from one
generation of us to another, and how so greatly was he taken with his
incomparable lord-general that he had named his first-born son Oliver, and
ever since there had been an Oliver Wheatman of the Hanyards. Then I told
how one of these later Olivers, which one a matter of no consequence, had