Sir John Constantine | Page 7

at my now being in that school and seeing that
very place where I sat when I was a boy occasioned me to remember
those very thoughts of my youth which then possessed me: sweet
thoughts indeed--'"
Here my father paused. "Let me be careful, now. I should be perfect in
the words, having read them more than a hundred times. 'Sweet
thoughts indeed,'" said he, "'that promised my growing years numerous
pleasures, without mixture of cares; and those to be enjoyed when
time--which I therefore thought slow-paced--had changed my youth
into manhood. But age and experience have taught me these were but
empty hopes, for I have always found it true, as my Saviour did foretell,
Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. Nevertheless, I saw there a
succession of boys using the same recreations, and, questionless,
possessed with the same thoughts that then possessed me. Thus one
generation succeeds another, both in their lives, recreations, hopes,
fears, and death.'"
"But I would not have you, lad," he went on, "to pay too much heed to
these thoughts, which will come to you in time, for as yet you are better
without 'em. Nor were they my only thoughts: for having brought back
my own sacrifice, which I had sometime hoped might be so great, but
now saw to be so little, at that moment I looked down to your place in
chapel and perceived that I had brought belike the best offering of all.
So my hope--thank God!--sprang anew as I saw you there standing
vigil by what bright armour you guessed not, nor in preparation for
what high warfare." He laid a hand on my shoulder. "Your chapel
to-day, child, has been the longer by a sermon. There, there! forget all
but the tail on't."
We rode out of Winchester with a fine clatter, all four of us upon hired
nags, the Cornish horses being left in the stables to rest; and after
crossing the Hog's Back, baited at Guildford. A thunderstorm in the

night had cleared the weather, which, though fine, was cooler, with a
brisk breeze playing on the uplands; and still as we went my spirits
sang with the larks overhead, so blithe was I to be sitting in saddle
instead of at a scob, and riding to London between the blown scents of
hedgerow and hayfield and beanfield, all fragrant of liberty yet none of
them more delicious to a boy than the mingled smell of leather and
horseflesh. Billy Priske kept up a chatter beside me like a brook's. He
had never till now been outside of Cornwall but in a fishing-boat, and
though he had come more than two hundred miles each new prospect
was a marvel to him. My father told me that, once across the Tamar
ferry, being told that he was now in Devonshire, he had sniffed and
observed the air to be growing "fine and stuffy;" and again, near Holt
Forest, where my father announced that we were crossing the border
between Hampshire and Surrey, he drew rein and sat for a moment
looking about him and scratching his head.
"The Lord's ways be past finding out," he murmured. "Not so much as
a post!"
"Why should there be a post?" demanded my uncle. "Why, sir, for the
men of Hampshire and the men of Surrey to fight over and curse one
another by on Ash Wednesdays. But where there's no landmark a plain
man can't remove it, and where he can't remove it I don't see how he
can be cursed for it."
"'Twould be a great inconvenience, as you say, Billy, if, for the sake of
argument, the men of Hampshire wanted to curse the men of Surrey."
"They couldn't do it"--Billy shook his head--"for the sake of argument
or any other sake; and therefore I say, though not one to dictate to the
Lord, that if a river can't be managed hereabouts-- and, these two not
being Devon and Cornwall, a whole river might be overdoing
things--there ought to be some little matter of a trout-stream, or at the
least a notice-board."
"The fellow's right," said my father. "Man would tire too soon of his
natural vices; so we invent new ones for him by making laws and
boundaries."

"Surely and virtues too," suggested my uncle, as we rode forward again.
"You will not deny that patriotism is a virtue?"
"Not I," said my father; "nor that it is the finest invention of all."
I remember the Hog's Back and the breeze blowing there because on
the highest rise we came on a gibbet and rode around it to windward on
the broad turfy margin of the road; and also because the sight put my
father in mind of a story which he narrated on