CHAPTER VIII

SEED-TIME


The Parson was a cassocked whirlwind in his wrath. He said little, not
being a man who wasted words when a thing was done, but he acted
decisively, pinning Annie by her terror to agree to a permanent
alteration in affairs. As soon as Ishmael could be moved--for the fit he
had had left him weak and nervous--the Parson took him to the Vicarage,
and there for the next three or four years, till he went to St. Renny,
Ishmael made his home.

They were, he realised much later, the happiest years of his life.
Looking back on them, he grudged his unconsciousness of the fact at the
time. There is nothing in the world quite like the atmosphere of an
old-fashioned English parsonage--the quietness, the well-bred but simple
air of it, with a tang of scholarly mustiness, the whole of a fragrance
never entirely lost to those who have known it intimately. Something of
the spirit of George Herbert, that homely gentleman of unassuming
saintliness, the epitome of everything that was best and most
characteristic in the Anglican Church, has descended on country
parsonages ever since and is only now beginning to wear thin. And it was
the Church of Herbert, of Jeremy Taylor, of Traherne--how above all he
would have loved the works of Traherne if they had then been
discovered!--that Boase represented. A Church domestic, so to speak,
with priestly powers, but wielded as the common laws of a household. The
widening ripples of the Oxford Movement had touched even the West with