I have told you something about Friar’s Oak, and about the life that we led there.  Now that my memory goes back to the old place it would gladly linger, for every thread which I draw from the skein of the past brings out half a dozen others that were entangled¹ with it.  I was in two minds when I began whether I had enough in me to make a book of, and now I know that I could write one about Friar’s Oak alone, and the folk whom I knew in my childhood.  They were hard and uncouth³, some of them, I doubt not; and yet, seen through the golden haze⁴ of time, they all seem sweet and lovable.  There was our good vicar, Mr. Jefferson, who loved the whole world save only Mr. Slack, the Baptist minister of Clayton; and there was kindly⁵ Mr. Slack, who was all men’s brother save only of Mr. Jefferson, the vicar of Friar’s Oak.  Then there was Monsieur Rudin, the French Royalist refugee who lived over on the Pangdean road, and who, when the news of a victory came in, was convulsed with joy because we had beaten Buonaparte, and shaken with rage because we had beaten the French, so that after the Nile he wept for a whole day out of delight and then for another one out of fury, alternately clapping his hands and stamping his feet.  Well I remember his thin, upright figure and the way in which he jauntily⁶ twirled his little cane⁷; for cold and hunger could not cast him down, though we knew that he had his share of both.  Yet he was so proud and had such a grand manner of talking, that no one dared to offer him a cloak or a meal.  I can see his face now, with a flush over each craggy cheek-bone when the butcher made him the present of some ribs⁸ of beef.  He could not but take it, and yet whilst he was stalking off he threw a proud glance over his shoulder at the butcher, and he said, “Monsieur, I have a dog!”  Yet it was Monsieur Rudin and not his dog who looked plumper for a week to come.

 

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