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“Wind up the jack for me,” said the maid to her supposed fellow-servant.

Charles, nothing loath, proceeded to do so. But he knew much less about handling a jack than a sword, and awkwardly wound it up the wrong way. The cook looked at him scornfully, and broke out in angry tones,–

“What countrymen are you, that you know not how to wind up a jack?”

Charles answered her contritely, repressing the merry twinkle in his eye.

“I am a poor tenant’s son of Colonel Lane, in Staffordshire,” he said; “we seldom have roast meat, and when we have, we don’t make use of a jack.”

“That’s not saying much for your Staffordshire cooks, and less for your larders,” replied the maid, with a head-toss of superiority.

The house where this took place still stands, with the old jack hanging beside the fireplace; and those who have seen it of late years do not wonder that Charles was puzzled how to wind it up. It might puzzle a wiser man.

There is another story in which the prince played his part as a kitchen servant. It is said that the soldiers got so close upon his track that they sought the house in which he was, not leaving a room in it unvisited. Finally they made their way to the kitchen, where was the man they sought, with a servant-maid who knew him. Charles looked around in nervous fear. His pursuers had never been so near him. Doubtless, for the moment, he gave up the game as lost. But the loyal cook was mistress of the situation. She struck her seeming fellow-servant a smart rap with the basting-ladle, and called out, shrewishly,–

“Now, then, go on with thy work; what art thou looking about for?”

The soldiers laughed as Charles sprang up with a sheepish aspect, and they turned away without a thought that in this servant lad lay hidden the prince they sought.

On September 13, ten days after the battle, Miss Lane and her groom reached Abbotsleigh, where they took refuge at the house of Mr. Norton, Colonel Lane’s cousin. To the great regret of the fugitive, he learned here that there was no vessel in the port of Bristol that would serve his purpose of flight. He remained in the house for four days, under his guise of a servant, but was given a chamber of his own, on pretence of indisposition. He was just well of an ague, said his mistress. He was, indeed, somewhat worn out with fatigue and anxiety, though of a disposition that would not long let him endure hunger or loneliness.

In fact, on the very morning after his arrival he made an early toilette, and went to the buttery-hatch for his breakfast. Here were several servants, Pope, the butler, among them. Bread and butter seems to have been the staple of the morning meal, though the butler made it more palatable by a liberal addition of ale and sack. As they ate they were entertained by a minute account of the battle of Worcester, given by a country fellow who sat beside Charles at table, and whom he concluded, from the accuracy of his description, to have been one of Cromwell’s soldiers.

Charles asked him how he came to know so well what took place, and was told in reply that he had been in the king’s regiment. On being questioned more closely, it proved that he had really been in Charles’s own regiment of guards.

“What kind of man was he you call the king?” asked Charles, with an assumed air of curiosity.

The fellow replied with an accurate description of the dress worn by the prince during the battle, and of the horse he rode. He looked at Charles on concluding.

“He was at least three fingers taller than you,” he said.

The buttery was growing too hot for Will Jackson. What if, in another look, this fellow should get a nearer glimpse at the truth? The disguised prince made a hasty excuse for leaving the place, being, as he says, “more afraid when I knew he was one of our own soldiers, than when I took him for one of the enemy’s.”