when on what they consider a religious mission.



CHAPTER I.


Squire Thorndyke, of the Manor House of Crawley, was, on the 1st
of September; 1782, walking up and down the little terrace in front
of the quaint old house in an unusually disturbed mood. He was a
man of forty three or four, stoutly and strongly built, and inclined
to be portly. Save the loss of his wife four years before, there
had been but little to ruffle the easy tenor of his life. A younger
son, he had, at his mother's death, when he was three and twenty,
come in for the small estate at Crawley, which had been her jointure.

For ten years he had led a life resembling that of most of his
neighbors; he had hunted and shot, been a regular attendant at any
main of cocks that was fought within fifteen miles of Crawley, had
occasionally been up to London for a week or two to see the gay
doings there. Of an evening he had generally gone down to the inn,
where he talked over, with two or three of his own condition and
a few of the better class of farmers, the news of the day, the war
with the French, the troubles in Scotland, the alarming march of
the Young Pretender, and his defeat at Culloden--with no very
keen interest in the result, for the Southern gentry and yeomen,
unlike those in the North, had no strong leanings either way. They
had a dull dislike for Hanoverian George, but no great love for the
exiled Stuarts, whose patron, the King of France, was an enemy of
England.