“Mine should be the shortest if I had any choice,” the young man rejoined with a smile.

“Right, quite right,” the crafty knight returned.  “All men would take that road if they could find it.  But with some the shortest road would not be the safest.  In your case I think it might be different.  You have a sufficiently good mien, and a sufficiently good figure, to serve you in lieu of other advantages.”

“Your fair speech would put me in conceit with myself, worthy Sir,” the young man rejoined with a well-pleased air; “were I not too conscious of my own demerits, not to impute what you say of me to good nature, or to flattery.”

“There you wrong me, my good young friend—­on my credit, you do.  Were I to resort to adulation, I must strain the points of compliment to find phrases that should come up to my opinion of your good looks; and as to my friendly disposition towards you, I have already said that your attentions have won it, so that mere good nature does not prompt my words.  I speak of you, as I think.  May I, without appearing too inquisitive, ask from what part of the country you come?”

“I am from Norfolk, worthy Sir,” the young man answered, “where my life has been spent among a set of men wild and uncouth, and fond of the chase as the Sherwood archers we read of in the ballads.  I am the son of a broken gentleman; the lord of a ruined house; with one old servant left me out of fifty kept by my father, and with scarce a hundred acres that I can still call my own, out of the thousands swept away from me.  Still I hunt in my father’s woods; kill my father’s deer; and fish in my father’s lakes; since no one molests me.  And I keep up the little church near the old tumble-down hall, in which are the tombs of my ancestors, and where my father lies buried; and the tenantry come there yet on Sundays, though I am no longer their master; and my father’s old chaplain, Sir Oliver, still preaches there, though my father’s son can no longer maintain him.”

“A sad change, truly,” Sir Francis said, in a tone of sympathy, and with a look of well-feigned concern; “and attributable, I much fear, to riot and profusion on the part of your father, who so beggared his son.”

“Not so, Sir,” the young man gravely replied; “my father was a most honourable man, and would have injured no one, much less the son on whom he doated.  Neither was he profuse; but lived bountifully and well, as a country gentleman, with a large estate, should live.  The cause of his ruin was that he came within the clutches of that devouring monster, which, like the insatiate dragon of Rhodes, has swallowed up the substance of so many families, that our land is threatened with desolation.  My father was ruined by that court, which, with a mockery of justice, robs men of their name, their fame, their lands, and goods; which perverts the course of law, and saps the principles of equity; which favours the knave, and oppresses the honest man; which promotes and supports extortion and plunder; which reverses righteous judgments, and asserts its own unrighteous supremacy, which, by means of its commissioners, spreads its hundred arms over the whole realm, to pillage and destroy—­so that no one, however distant, can keep out of its reach, or escape its supervision; and which, if it be not uprooted, will, in the end, overthrow the kingdom.  Need I say my father was ruined by the Star-Chamber?”