Of old Maudlin, what more can be said than that she passed her uneventful later years in the snug ingle nook at Nether Hall, made much of by every member of the establishment.
Adam Lockit, being of another turn of mind, declined to forsake his quarters in the gatehouse. New masters of the old mansion might come and they might go. Maltster or magnifico, peasant or peer, but monarch of his trophy-hung little domain he remained; bequeathing it, when at last he went the way of all flesh, with his well-seasoned tales of flood and field, and hobgoblinry, to Barnaby Diggles, who superadded in fair writing (an accomplishment, by the way, for which he was beholden to his old master's daughter), that tradition of his own times, of the famous plot and conspiracy against his gracious majesty King Charles the Second—known as the Rye House Plot—and whose valuable assistance towards the putting together of this present record, it well behoves this chronicler gratefully to recognize.
The author of this story.
Need it be added that the substantial marks of the king's gratitude which were bestowed on the hostess of the King's Arms, entirely converted Master Sheppard to his wife's way of thinking? and they subsided into the happiest peacefullest pair you could find in Hertfordshire; but then Master Sheppard never again put his fingers in what his wife called "pies that weren't baked for his eatin';" and when sea-coal was wanted for the King's Arms' hearth-places, honest sea-coal it might be, but Mistress Sheppard took good care it should be conveyed overland in a proper decent wagon; and always stood by in person, to count the sacks, and to see to the bottom of them too.
As to oysters, she steadily set her face against the things, and refused ever again to admit the ghost of a shell of one inside her doors. "If chub and barbel and trout—trout such as his sacred majesty King Charles, not to speak of the renowned Master Isaak Walton before him, had partaken of under her roof, was not good enough for common wayfarin' folks, why, let 'em go farther," she said, "an' fare worse."
The end.
Spiked atop of the spiral chimney of the gatehouse, there hung for many a year the ghastly decapitated head of one of the arch conspirators, but long ago it crumbled to nothingness, and no blot now mars the scene that is as goodly and fair as old England has to show. Side by side in sweet converse, like old friends, the two rivers still wander on amid the green pastures. Still round about, and in and out of the red battlemented walls, the rooks flit, and caw their never-ending chorus, and the tall trees wave their long arms day and night, and whisper to those who list to hear it, the story of the Old Rye House.
THE END.