Read Ebook: Boys of Other Countries by Taylor Bayard Coburn Frederick Simpson Illustrator Davis John Parker Illustrator

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But it must be said that a great deal of the book is taken up with religious discussions, mostly centring on the perceived imperfections of the Papist religion, as opposed to the Protestant. If you are not interested in this it does tend to make the going a bit heavy at times. But if you are interested, well then, it makes good reading.

LITTLE CLARE'S FIRST HOME.

"The mossy marbles rest On the lips he hath pressed In their bloom, And the names he loved to hear Have been carved for many a year On the tomb."

"Cold!" said the carrier, blowing on his fingers to keep them warm.

"Cold, bully Penmore!" ejaculated Hal Dockett,--farrier, horse-leech, and cow-doctor in ordinary to the town of Bodmin and its neighbourhood... "Lack-a-daisy! thou that hast been carrier these thirty years, and thy father afore thee, and his father afore him, ever sith `old Dick Boar' days, shouldst be as hard as a milestone by this time. 'Tis the end of March, fellow!"

Be it known that "old Dick Boar" was Mr Dockett's extremely irreverent style of allusion to His Majesty King Richard the Third.

"'Tis the end of as bitter a March as hath been in Cornwall these hundred years," said the carrier. "Whither away now, lad?"

"Truly, unto Bradmond, whither I am bidden to see unto the black cow."

"Is it sooth, lad, that the master is failing yonder?"

"Ay so!" echoed the carrier. "Well! we must all be laid in earth one day. God be wi' thee, lad!"

And with a crack of his whip, the waggon lumbered slowly forward upon the Truro road, while Dockett went on his way towards a house standing a little distance on the left, in a few acres of garden, with a paddock behind.

About the cold there was no question. The ground, which had been white with snow for many days, was now a mixture of black and white, under the influence of a thaw; while a bitterly cold wind, which made everybody shiver, rose now and then to a wild whirl, slammed the doors, and groaned through the wood-work. A fragment of cloud, rather less dim and gloomy than the rest of the heavy grey sky, was as much as could be seen of the sun.

Nor was the political atmosphere much more cheerful than the physical. All over England,--and it might be said, all over Europe,--men's hearts were failing them for fear,--by no means for the first time in that century. In Holland the Spaniards, vanquished not by men, but by winds and waves from God, had abandoned the siege of Leyden; and the sovereignty of the Netherlands had been offered to Elizabeth of England, but after some consideration was refused. In France, the Massacre of Saint Bartholomew, nearly three years before, had been followed by the siege of La Rochelle, the death of the miserable Charles the Ninth, and the alliance in favour of Popery, which styled itself the Holy League. At home, gardeners were busy introducing the wallflower, the hollyhock, basil, and sweet marjoram; the first licence for public plays was granted to Burbage and his company, among whom was a young man from Warwickshire, a butcher's son, with a turn for making verses, whose name was William Shakspere; the Queen had issued a decree forbidding costly apparel ; and the last trace of feudal serfdom had just disappeared, by the abolition of "villenage" upon the Crown manors. As concerned other countries, except when active hostilities were going on, Englishmen were not generally much interested, unless it were in that far-off New World which Columbus had discovered not a hundred years before,--or in that unknown land, far away also, beyond the white North Cape, whither adventurers every now and then set out with the hope of discovering a north-west passage to China,--the north-west passage which, though sought now with a different object, no one has discovered yet.

Nineteen years had passed since that triumphant 17th of November which had seen all England in a frenzy of joy on the accession of Elizabeth Tudor. They were at most very young men and women who could not remember the terrible days of Mary, and the glad welcome given to her sister. Still warm at the heart of England lay the memory of the Marian martyrs; still deep and strong in her was hatred of every shadow of Popery. The petition had not yet been erased from the Litany--why should it ever have been?--"From the Bishop of Rome and all his enormities, good Lord, deliver us!"

On the particular afternoon whereon the story opens, one of the dreariest points of the landscape was the house towards which Hal Dockett's steps were bent. It was of moderate size, and might have been very comfortable if somebody had taken pains to make it so. But it looked as if the pains had not been taken. Half the windows were covered by shutters; the wainscot was sadly in want of a fresh coat of paint; the woodbine, which should have been trained up beside the porch, hung wearily down, as if it were tired of trying to climb when nobody helped it; the very ivy was ragged and dusty. The doors shut with that hollow sound peculiar to empty uncurtained rooms, and groaned, as they opened, over the scarcity of oil. And if the spectator had passed inside, he would have seen that out of the whole house, only four rooms were inhabited beside the kitchen and its dependencies. In all the rest, the dusty furniture was falling to pieces from long neglect, and the spiders carried on their factories at their own pleasure.

One of these four rooms, a long, narrow chamber, on the upper floor, gave signs of having been inhabited very recently. On the square table lay a quantity of coarse needlework, which somebody seemed to have bundled together and left hastily; and on one of the hard, straight-backed chairs was a sorely-disabled wooden doll, of the earliest Dutch order, with mere rudiments, of arms and legs, and deprived by accidents of a great portion of these. The needlework said plainly that there must be a woman in the dreary house, and the doll, staring at the ceiling with black expressionless eyes, spoke as distinctly for the existence of a child.

Suddenly the door of this room opened with a plaintive creak, and a little woman, on the elderly side of middle life, put in her head.

A bright, energetic, active little woman she seemed,--not the sort of person who might be expected to put up meekly with dim windows and dusty floors.

"Marry La'kin!" she said aloud. "Of a truth, what a charge be these childre!"

The cause of this remark was hardly apparent, since no child was to be seen; but the little woman came further into the room, her gestures soon showing that she was looking for a child who ought to have been visible.

"Well! I've searched every chamber in this house save the Master's closet. Where can yon little popinjay have hid her? Marry La'kin!"

This expletive was certainly not appreciated by her who used it. Nothing could much more have astonished or shocked Barbara Polwhele --than whom no more uncompromising Protestant breathed between John o' Groat's and the Land's End--than to discover that since she came into the room, she had twice invoked the assistance of Saint Mary the Virgin.

Barbara's search soon brought her to the conclusion that the child she sought was not in that quarter. She shut the door, and came out into a narrow gallery, from one side of which a wooden staircase ran down into the hall. It was a wide hall of vaulted stone, hung with faded tapestry, old and wanting repair, like everything else in its vicinity. Across the hall Barbara trotted with short, quick steps, and opening a door at the further end, went into the one pleasant room in all the house. This was a very small turret-chamber, hexagonal in shape, three of its six sides being filled with a large bay-window, in the middle compartment of which were several coats of arms in stained glass. A table, which groaned under a mass of books and papers, nearly filled the room; and writing at it sat a venerable-looking, white-haired man, who, seeing Barbara, laid down his pen, wiped his spectacles, and placidly inquired what she wanted. He will be an old friend to some readers: for he was John Avery of Bradmond.

"Master, an't like you, have you seen Mrs Clare of late?"

"How late, Barbara?"

"Marry, not the fourth part of an hour gone, I left the child in the nursery a-playing with her puppet, when I went down to let in Hal Dockett, and carry him to see what ailed the black cow; and now I be back, no sign of the child is any whither. I have been in every chamber, and looked in the nursery thrice."

"Where should she be?" quietly demanded Mr Avery.

"Marry, where but in the nursery, without you had fetched her away."

"And where should she not be?"

"Why, any other whither but here and there,--more specially in the garden."

"Nay, then, reach me my staff, Barbara, and we will go look in the garden. If that be whither our little maid should specially not be, 'tis there we be bound to find her."

"Marry, but that is sooth!" said Barbara heartily, bringing the walking-stick. "Never in all my life saw I child that gat into more mischievousness, nor gave more trouble to them that had her in charge."

"Thy memory is something short, Barbara," returned her master with a dry smile, "'Tis but little over a score of years sithence thou wert used to say the very same of her father."

"Eh, Master!--nay, not Master Walter!" said Barbara, deprecatingly.

"Well, trouble and sorrow be ever biggest in the present tense," answered he. "And I wot well tho

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