THE DWELLING-PLACE OF LIGHT

By WINSTON CHURCHILL


Volume 1.


1917




CHAPTER I

In this modern industrial civilization of which we are sometimes wont to
boast, a certain glacier-like process may be observed. The bewildered,
the helpless--and there are many--are torn from the parent rock, crushed,
rolled smooth, and left stranded in strange places. Thus was Edward
Bumpus severed and rolled from the ancestral ledge, from the firm granite
of seemingly stable and lasting things, into shifting shale; surrounded
by fragments of cliffs from distant lands he had never seen. Thus, at
five and fifty, he found himself gate-keeper of the leviathan Chippering
Mill in the city of Hampton.

That the polyglot, smoky settlement sprawling on both sides of an
historic river should be a part of his native New England seemed at times
to be a hideous dream; nor could he comprehend what had happened to him,
and to the world of order and standards and religious sanctions into
which he had been born. His had been a life of relinquishments. For a