BRAMPTON-AMONG-THE-ROSES.

the sunshine, and Lady Falmouth's sweet, brown gipsy
face, and pretty Nell Gwynne's lively talk, that would
not have suited the solemn court of Cromwell; but he
had fought under his father and mixed with the roys-
tering Cavaliers who battled under the royal banner of
Charles I., and belonged to the old race of warriors
whose blood was shed in many a hard-fought field to
uphold the throne of a king that cared more for himself
than he did for those who died for him. Time, in the
record which he keeps, has revealed many a secret
not known in his lifetime, that proves Charles I. to
have been untruthful; and his son was no keeper of
his promises, as the heir of the old cavalier, Sir
Baldwin Brampton, lived to prove. He had known
Cowley, and Milton, and Dryden, and would quote
passages from their last new poem, and Clarendon, the
historian, whose daughter the king's brother married,
and whose grand sentences were like a coiled-up rope,
fold within fold, which you could see no end to. He
had also seen Colonel Blood, who nearly succeeded in
carrying off the Crown jewels, and who was made quite
a lion of for attempting such a daring robbery. He
was in London at the time of the Great Fire, and could
tell how the flames roared through the streets, and made
them hot as the mouths of furnaces; he stood and
saw church towers and steeples topple down with a
roar like an earthquake, while houses were constantly
blown up with gunpowder to prevent the fire from
spreading, and the pavement on which he stood was so
hot that it burnt the soles of his boots while he
assisted the King's soldiers in mining the houses,
which cast a light for twenty miles round the burning
city-St. Pauls standing like a landmark in the centre
of the blaze, until the great temple came down at last
with a tremendous crash. He pictured the blood-red