CHAPTER V.
ISRAEL IN THE LION'S DEN.
Harassed day and night, hunted from food and sleep, driven from hole to hole like a fox in the woods, with no chance to earn an hour's wages, he was at last advised by one whose sincerity he could not doubt, to apply, on the good word of Sir John Millet, for a berth as laborer in the King's Gardens at Kew.

There, it was said, he would be entirely safe, as no soldier durst approach those premises to molest any soul therein employed.

It struck the poor exile as curious, that the very den of the British lion, the private grounds of the British King, should be commended to a refugee as his securest asylum.
His nativity carefully concealed, and being personally introduced to the chief gardener by one who well knew him; armed, too, with a line from Sir John, and recommended by his introducer as uncommonly expert at horticulture; Israel was soon installed as keeper of certain less private plants and walks of the park.
It was here, to one of his near country retreats, that, coming from perplexities of state--leaving far behind him the dingy old bricks of St.James--George the Third was wont to walk up and down beneath the long arbors formed by the interlockings of lofty trees.
More than once, raking the gravel, Israel through intervening foliage would catch peeps in some private but parallel walk, of that lonely figure, not more shadowy with overhanging leaves than with the shade of royal meditations.
Unauthorized and abhorrent thoughts will sometimes invade the best human heart.

Seeing the monarch unguarded before him; remembering that the war was imputed more to the self-will of the King than to the willingness of parliament or the nation; and calling to mind all his own sufferings growing out of that war, with all the calamities of his country; dim impulses, such as those to which the regicide Ravaillae yielded, would shoot balefully across the soul of the exile.

But thrusting Satan behind him, Israel vanquished all such temptations.