an oak tree above their heads.  Afterwards, a lady named Jane Lane helped him over another part of his journey, by letting him ride on horseback before her as her servant; but, when she stopped at an inn, he was very near being found out, because he did not know how to turn the spit in the kitchen when the cook asked him.  However, he got safely to Brighton, which was only a little village then, and a boat took him to France, where his mother was living.

In the meantime, his young sister and brother, Elizabeth and Henry, had been sent to the Isle of Wight, to Carisbrook Castle.  Elizabeth was pining away with sorrow, and before long she was found dead, with her cheek resting on her open Bible.  After this, little Henry was sent to be with his mother in France.

The eldest daughter, Mary, had been married just as the war began to the Prince of Orange, who lived in Holland, and was left a widow with one little son.  James, Duke of York, the second brother, had at first been in the keeping of a Parliamentary nobleman, with his brother and sister, in London; but, during a game of hide-and-seek, he crept out of the gardens and met some friends, who dressed him in girls’ clothes and took him to a ship in the Thames, which carried him to Holland.  Little Henrietta, the youngest, had been left, when only six weeks old, to the care of one of her mother’s ladies.  When she was nearly three, the lady did not think it safe to keep her any longer in England.  So she stained her face and hands brown with walnut juice, to look like a gipsy, took the child upon her back, and trudged to the coast.

Little Henrietta could not speak plain, but she always called herself by a name she meant to be princess, and the lady was obliged to call her Piers, and pretend that she was a little boy, when the poor child grew angry at being treated so differently from usual, and did all she possibly could to make the strangers understand that she was no beggar boy.  However, at last she was safe across the sea, and was with her mother at Paris, where the king of France, Queen Henrietta’s nephew, was very kind to the poor exiles.  The misfortune was, that the queen brought up little Henrietta as a Roman Catholic, and tried to make Henry one also; but he was old enough to be firm to his father’s Church, and he went away to his sister in Holland.  James, however did somewhat late become a Roman Catholic; and Charles would have been one, if he had cared enough about religion to do what would have lessened his chance of getting back to England as king.  But these two brothers were learning no good at Paris, and were growing careless of the right and fond of pleasure.  James and Henry, after a time, joined the French army, that they might learn the art of war.  They were both very brave, but it was sad that when France and England went to war, they should be in the army of the enemies of their country.

CHAPTER XXXVI.