for the empty bowls and brought them home. The boys were curious
to know who had eaten the food, for they never met any one coming
or going, and never saw any one up on the Rock. In reply their
father told them that there were men at work in the forest near
by; yet they never heard voices nor the sound of an axe, and it
was only long afterward that they learned the real reason for
what they had done. If one of the boys had waited long enough
some morning, lying still and hidden in the bushes, he might have
seen a man come slowly and cautiously through the woods toward
him, a dignified, grave-looking person with something foreign in
his dress, something soldierly in his bearing, as if he were
accustomed to commanding others; he might have watched this
stranger--so different from the people he knew--take up the
dishes of food and disappear again into the dark forest. And he
would have wondered why a man like that, who was evidently not a
hunter and not a new settler, should be hiding in the woods
around New Haven.

Twelve years before, in England, this same man had taken part in
a very different scene. There was a great trial held in the
stately old Hall of Westminster and the prisoner at the bar was
the King of England himself, and among the fifty-nine judges who
condemned him to death was the man who was now hunted for his own
life and was in hiding near the Sperry farm that summer, three
thousand miles away from all he loved in England.

There were nearly one hundred men who had some part, large or
small, in the trial and death of King Charles the First, and all
of them were in great danger eleven years later when the
Royalists returned to power and his son, Charles the Second,