Captain Blood

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. Sternly disapproving eyes considered him from a window opposite but went disregarded. Mr. 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. These straggling excited groups were mainly composed of men with green boughs in their hats and the most ludicrous of weapons in their hands. 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.