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enough to have him, and there’s some would have cut and run for it; but he wouldn’t strike his colours to do a thing like that, not my old Captain.’
    ‘And so King James put him back in the Tower and cut his head off, to please the Dons,’ said Amias fiercely, after a little silence. ‘King Charles wouldn’t ever have done a mean thing like that.’
    ‘Tell some more about Sir Walter,’ said Simon.
    ‘Nay, my dears, that be enough for one day; and ’tis time you was on your way back to Torrington. Maybe another time I’ll tell ’ee more,’ said Pentecost, and drawing his long legs under him he got up.
    The two boys scrambled to their feet, and stood gazing up at him. ‘We can come again, then?’ said Simon hopefully.
    ‘Aye, come along when you like. But don’t ’ee go upsetting Bess if her should be here and I should be from home.’
    ‘We won’t,’ they promised. ‘And thank you, Pentecost,’ and Simon picked up the box with the chrysalis in it, which had all but escaped his mind again.
    ‘Oh, we almost forgot,’ said Amias, turning in the doorway, ‘We know your name, but perhaps you don’t know ours: I’m Amias Hannaford, and he’s Simon Carey.’
    ‘’Tis a maister fine thing for a man to know the names of his guests,’ said the Fiddler, and his eyes twinkled under his drooping hat-brim. ‘Good day to ’ee, my dears.’
    ‘Good day,’ they said, and they went out.
    Pentecost Fiddler did not come to the door to see them off, and when they halted on the woodshore and glanced back the cottage looked completely derelict once more.
    ‘You wouldn’t think anyone lived there at all,’ said Simon.
    ‘No,’ Amias agreed thoughtfully. ‘You know, if you were wanting somewhere to hide, Solitude would be an awfully good place. I’ll wager if Sir Walter Raleigh had hidden here, King James would never have found him to cut his head off.’
    ‘If you didn’t know it was here, you’d never find it,’ Simon said, and as they plunged away into the trees he added triumphantly, ‘and if you
did
know it was here, you’d be scared of coming to look, because of the Good People—everybody except us, that is.’
    It had been an adventure worthy of the wild golden afternoon, and the full splendour of it held them silent until they had almost got back to Taddiport. Then Simon dropped the chrysalis box, the lid fell off, and the chrysalis fell out, and they had to scramble after it among the bramble roots.
    ‘Got it,’ Simon said, and put it carefully back in the box. ‘Funny, it being a sort of unicorn,’ he said.
    Amias peered at the chrysalis, his eyes brightening with an idea.
    ‘We could say, “As sure as unicorns can fly,” and “as sure as unicorns lay eggs,” and everybody’d think we were quite mazed—and all the time it would be true.’
    ‘Umm,’ said Simon, and put the lid on again.
    Neither of them mentioned the matter farther, but from that day forward ‘As sure as unicorns’ became a kind of private catch-phrase between the two of them.

II
The Last Day’s Freedom
    ON A STILL September afternoon Simon and Amias lay up in the high orchard behind Lovacott. It was their last day of freedom, for next morning they were riding for Tiverton, to become scholars at Blundell’s School; and in the intervals of helping to get in the harvest, they had taken leave of all their old haunts: no mean task, for they knew and loved every inch of the country for miles around. They were just back now from a long day in the Taw valley; and only the day before they had been to say good-bye to Pentecost. In the year since that wild autumn afternoon when they had called on him with the unicorn chrysalis—which had most disappointingly failed to turn into a moth—Pentecost Fiddler had become a great friend; and Solitude, in the character of the Golden City of Manoa, had known them very often, though they had contrived to keep their visits secret from the rest of the world. Now it would