the past brings out half a dozen others that were entangled 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
uncouth, some of them, I doubt not; and yet, seen through the golden
haze 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 kindly 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 jauntily twirled his little cane; 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 ribs 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.

Then I remember Mr. Paterson, the farmer, who was what you would now
call a Radical, though at that time some called him a Priestley-ite,
and some a Fox-ite, and nearly everybody a traitor. It certainly