dawn, the hour of two
THE DUKE 'S REAPPEARANCE -- A FAMILY TRADITION According to the kinsman who told me the story , Christopher Swetman 's house , on the outskirts of King 's - Hintock village , was in those days larger and better kept than when , many years later , it was sold to the lord of the manor adjoining ; after having been in the Swetman family , as one may say , since the Conquest . Some people would have it to be that the thing happened at the house opposite , belonging to one Childs , with whose family the Swetmans afterwards intermarried . But that it was at the original homestead of the Swetmans can be shown in various ways ; chiefly by the unbroken traditions of the family , and indirectly by the evidence of the walls themselves , which are the only ones thereabout with windows mullioned in the Elizabethan manner , and plainly of a date anterior to the event ; while those of the other house might well have been erected fifty or eighty years later , and probably were ; since the choice of Swetman 's house by the fugitive was doubtless dictated by no other circumstance than its then suitable loneliness . It was a cloudy July morning just before dawn , the hour of two having been struck by Swetman 's one-handed clock on the stairs , that is still preserved in the family . Christopher heard the strokes from his chamber , immediately at the top of the staircase , and overlooking the front of the house . He did not wonder that he was sleepless . The rumours and excitements which had latterly stirred the neighbourhood , to the effect that the rightful King of England had landed from Holland , at a port only eighteen miles to the south-west of Swetman 's house , were enough to make wakeful and anxious even a contented yeoman like him .