The Birmingham age-herald., 1924-09-03
: CHAPTER |
 The Messenger


 DEFER BLOOD, bachelor of medi. cine and several other things be- sides, smoked pipe and tended i the geraniums boxed on the sill of his window above Walter Lane in the town was divided between his task and the stream of humanity in the narrow street below stream which poured for the second time that day towards Castle Field, where earlier in the aft ernoon Ferguson, the dukes chaplain, had preached sermon containing more treason than divinity.
 | These struggling excited groups were mainly composed of men with green boughs in their hats and the most lu- dicrous of weapons in their hands. Some, it is true, shouldered fowling pieces, and here and there sword was brandished; but more of them were armed with clubs. and most of them trailed the mammoth bikes fashioned out of scythes, as formidable to the eye as they were clumsy to the hand. There were weavers, brewers, carpen. ters, smiths, masons, bricklayers, cob blers, and representatives of every oth- CT of the trades of peace among these improvised men of war. Bridgewater, like Taunton, has yielded so generously of its. manhood to the service of the bastard duke that for any to abstain whose age and strength admitted of his bearing arms was to brand himself a coward or a papist.
 1 Yet Peter Blood, who was not only able to bear arms, and a papist only when it suited him, tended his gera- niums and smoked his pipe on that warm July evening as indifferently as if nothing were afoot.
 He laughed and sighed in one; but the laugh dominated the sigh, for Mir. Blood was unsympathetic, as are most self-sufficient men; and he was very self sufficient diversity had taught him so to be. A more tender-hearted man, possessing his vision and his knowledge, might have found cause for tears in the contemplation of these ar dent, simple, non-confOrmist sheep go- ing forth to the shambles-eseorted to the rallying ground on Castle Field by wives and daughters, sweethearts and mothers, sustained by the delusion that they were to take the field in de- fense of right, of liberty, and of religion. For he knew, as all Bridgewater knew and had known now for some hours, that it was MOnmouth's intention to deliver battle that same night. The duke was to lead a surprise attack upon the royalist army under Feversham that was now encamped on Sedgemoor. MT. Blood assumed that Lord Feversham would be equally well-informed, and if in this assumption he was wrong, at least he was justified of it. He was not to suppose the royalist commander so indifferently skilled in sthe trade he followed.
 Peter Blood was the son of an Irish medicus who had early resolved that the boy should follow his own honorable profession, and Peter Blood, being quick to learn and oddly greedy of knowledge, had satisfied his parent of receiving at the age of 20 the degree of baccalareus medicine at Trinity col lege, Dublin. His father survived that satisfaction by three months only. His mother had been dead some years al- ready. Thus Peter Blood came into an inheritance of some few hundred pounds, with which he had set out to see the world. A set of curious chances led him to take service with the Dutch, then at war with France; and pre- affection for the sea made him elect that this service should be upon that element. He had the advantage of a commission under the famous de Ruyter, and fought in the Mediterranean en- gagement in which that great Dutch admiral lost his life.
 After the Peace of Nimeguen his movements are obscure. But we know that he spent two years in a Spanish prison, though we do not know how he contrived to get there. It may be, due to this that upon his release he took his sword to France, and saw service with the French in their warning upon the Spanish Netherlands. Having reached, at last, the age of 32, his appetite for adventure surfeited, his health having grown indifferent as the result of neg lected wound, he was suddenly over whelmed by homesickness.. He took ship from Nantes with intent to cross to Ireland. But the vessel being driven by stress of weather into Bridgewater bay, and BlO0d's health having grown worse during the voyage, he decided to go ashore there, additionally urged to it by the fact that it was his moth- CTS native soil.
 Thus in January of that year, 1885, he had come to Bridgewater, pOssessor of a fortune that was approximately the same as that with which he had originally set out from Dublin eleven years ago.
 Because he liked the place, in which his health was rapidly restored to him, and because he conceived that he had