Bridgewater, like Taunton, had yielded so generously of its manhood to the service of the bastard Duke that for any to abstain whose age and strength admitted of his bearing arms was to brand himself a coward or a papist. There were weavers, brewers, carpenters, smiths, masons, bricklayers, cobblers, and representatives of every other of the trades of peace among these improvised men of war. Some, it is true, shouldered fowling pieces, and here and there a sword was brandished but more of them were armed with clubs, and most of them trailed the mammoth pikes fashioned out of scythes, as formidable to the eye as they were clumsy to the hand. These straggling, excited groups were mainly composed of men with green boughs in their hats and the most ludicrous of weapons in their hands. Blood's attention was divided between his task and the stream of humanity in the narrow street below a stream which poured for the second time that day towards Castle Field, where earlier in the afternoon Ferguson, the Duke's chaplain, had preached a sermon containing more treason than divinity.

Sternly disapproving eyes considered him from a window opposite, but went disregarded. Peter Blood, bachelor of medicine and several other things besides, smoked a pipe and tended the geraniums boxed on the sill of his window above Water Lane in the town of Bridgewater. This ebook was created with StreetLib Write

Captain blood by rafael sabatini