To the casual Londoner who lounged, intolerant and impatient, at the blacksmith's door while ahorse was shod, or a cracked spoke mended, Great Keynes seemed but a poor backwater of a place, compared with the rush of the Brighton road eight miles to the east from which he had turned off, or the whirling cauldron of London City, twenty miles to the north, towards which he was travelling.The triangular green, with its stocks and horse-pond, overlooked by the grey benignant churchtower, seemed a tame exchange for seething Cheapside and the crowded ways about the Temple orWhitehall; and it was strange to think that the solemn-faced rustics who stared respectfully at thegorgeous stranger were of the same human race as the quick-eyed, voluble townsmen who chatteredand laughed and grimaced over the news that came up daily from the Continent or the North, andwas tossed to and fro, embroidered and discredited alternately, all day long.And yet the great waves and movements that, rising in the hearts of kings and politicians, or inthe sudden strokes of Divine Providence, swept over Europe and England, eventually always rippledup into this placid country village; and the lives of Master Musgrave, who had retired upon hisearnings, and of old Martin, who cobbled the ploughmen's shoes, were definitely affected andchanged by the plans of far-away Scottish gentlemen, and the hopes and fears of the inhabitants ofSouth Europe. Through all the earlier part of Elizabeth's reign, the menace of the Spanish Empirebrooded low on the southern horizon, and a responsive mutter of storm sounded now and againfrom the north, where Mary Stuart reigned over men's hearts, if not their homes; and lovers ofsecular England shook their heads and were silent as they thought of their tiny country, so rent withinternal strife, and ringed with danger.For Great Keynes, however, as for most English villages and towns at this time, secular affairswere so deeply and intricately interwoven with ecclesiastical matters that none dared decide on theone question without considering its relation to the other; and ecclesiastical affairs, too, touchedthem more personally than any other, since every religious change scored a record of itself presentlywithin the church that was as familiar to them as their own cottages.On none had the religious changes fallen with more severity than on the Maxwell family thatlived in the Hall, at the upper and southern end of the green. Old Sir Nicholas, though hisconvictions had survived the tempest of unrest and trouble that had swept over England, and he hadremained a convinced and a stubborn Catholic, yet his spiritual system was sore and inflamed withinhim. To his simple and obstinate soul it was an irritating puzzle as to how any man could pass fromthe old to a new faith, and he had been known to lay his whip across the back of a servant who hadprofessed a desire to try the new religio