4 OUR SUMMER MIGRANTS. 



of loyalty to the Stuarts ; and one Lieutenant 

 Hopkins, with a troop of dragoons, swooped 

 down on Eastbourne to search the squire's 

 house, and, if needful, arrest him as a Malignant. 

 The squire was laid up with the gout; but Mis- 

 tress Wilson, his true wife, with the rarely-fail- 

 ing shrewdness of her sex, placed before Lieu- 

 tenant Hopkins and his troopers a prodigious 

 pie filled with Wheatears, " which rare repast," 

 the chronicle goes on to say, " the soldiers did 

 taste with so much amazement, delight, and 

 jollity," that the squire upstairs had ample time 

 to burn all the papers which would compromise 

 him, and when Lieutenant Hopkins, full of 

 Wheatear pie, came to search the house, there 

 was not so much treasonable matter found as 

 could have brought a mouse within peril of a 

 prcemunire. At the Restoration the Lord of 

 the Manor became Sir William Wilson of East- 

 bourne, a dignity well earned by his devotion to 

 the Royal cause ; but the chronicle goes on to 

 hint that Charles II. was passionately fond of 

 Wheatears, and that possibly the liberality of 



