For Three years' space: A little time I wot;
Yet many Pranks I plai'd, and Purses got.
The talisman, according to the author of these marvels, lasted him until the time when he was present at the siege of Youghal, and its expiry was marked by his being wounded there.
He was a wide traveller, our gallant "Captain." We hear of him as a "true Royalist," receiving a commission from Sir William Compton, and find him at the desperate two-months' siege of Colchester, where the beleaguered Royalists made a last stand for Charles the First. On the surrender of that town, August 27th, 1648, to Fairfax, he managed to escape in woman's, or, according to another account, sailor's clothes.
The scene now shifts to Enfield, and we perceive Hind and the regicide, Hugh Peters, encountering in the green rides of the Chase. Politely Hind requests his purse, yet discloses a not altogether inopportune pistol. To this Peters replies with a defensive volley of texts. "Thou shalt not steal; let him that stole steal no more," and the like, together with a variety of paraphrases of the eighth commandment.
Hind, anxious to answer Peters in his own vein, finds himself a little floored at first, from want of practice, but presently he begins, "Verily," says he, imitating the sanctimonious tones of the Puritan, "if thou hadst regarded the Divine principles, as thou oughtest to have done, thou wouldst not have wrested them to such an abominable and wicked sense as thou didst the words of the Prophet, when he said, 'Bind their Kings with chains, and their nobles with fetters of iron.' Didst thou not then, detestable hypocrite, endeavour from these words to aggravate the misfortunes of thy Royal master, whom thy cursed republican party unjustly murdered before the gate of his own palace?"
Stand and Deliver! Next in order comes;