Part 32 (1/1)

Perhaps, however, my most sensational link with the past was as follows

When I first came into Surrey, the old Lord Lovelace--the hter, and who built Horsley Towers--was still alive and could be seen, as I saw hi about our Surrey lanes in a pony-chaise Lord Lovelace is reported to haveentry in his diary about the year 1810, that is, when he was a boy some ten or twelve years old--”Today I dined with the old Lord Onslow [a neighbour then, presue], and heard him say that as a boy he had known one of the Crouard round the scaffold when Charles I was executed”

Oddly enough, I have another link with the Croo, lad to say I can speak in the present tense, toldon one of his farms below Lansdowne, the hill that rises above Bath The tenant of the land was a very old farrande, but whom he had just known as a boy, used to say that she ree after the Battle of Lansdowne and took every loaf of bread out of the place

An even more personal link with the past was afforded by reat-aunt She had seen George III walking on the terrace at Windsor, old, blind, andto those poor blind eyes and vacant wits every time he turned in his constitutional Another of her recollections, however, was farto ed to a naval family, and her mother's sister had married Admiral Byron, the seaman uncle of the poet Therefore, Byron and Miss Sykes were in that unnas to those who have an aunt or an uncle in common It happened that my aunt was on a visit to the Byrons when the poet's body, which was consigned to the Adht to London The Admiral, who lived near Windsor, posted up to receive the barrel of spirits in which the reruesome visit the ladies of his fairl of fifteen or sixteen, were very anxious to knohat he had seen and what the remains of the most-talked-of man in the Europe of his day looked like ”What did he look like, ator,”

said the Ade that men should prefer to put their kin in what, in the naval records after Trafalgar, is called ”a pickle” rather than give then field”! But on such , not of reasoning

So h, perhaps, I ought to add a postscript upon the writing of h arduous a task it is At any rate, it has proved so in h it was quite worth while to record , I ive pleasure to my readers, the part of the writer rateful

”Why,” I asked myself, ”should I e to say, what I had looked forward to almost with dread, turned out to be by far the pleasantest literary experience of my life I have never been one of those people who dislike writing, or find it, as so; but I was not in the least prepared to find how pleasant it could be to dive into the depths of memory and let, what the author of the anonyrih the labyrinth of the past

But, though the path was pleasant, nay, exhilarating and sti, I ical experiences, regrets, or disillusionments I have had no temptation to write as to the shortness and precariousness of human existence, or to reflect how base I had found ain, to deplore the past, curse the present, and dread the future Life toback, seems on the whole a very natural and sily than I do that we are being swept along by the hty current of a vast river, without any clearer indication of what is the outlet of the river than of what is its source But though these things reat deal of rhetoric, they soain, natural and non-infla the vagueness of theology, call ”the larger hope,” but which I should be content to call plainly the mercy of God--a mercy which I, for one, make bold to say I would rather have uncovenanted than covenanted Covenantedwhich may do very well at an insurance office or for business purposes, but they are not thefrom an earthly father Then how can one dare to speak of them in the same breath with God?

”But this,” I hear so of the permanence of fact” Well, I, for one, am content to rest on faith, honest and instinctive Faith, to my mind, is a fact and a very palpable fact,--a fact as vital as any of the other great incommensurables and insolubles of our existence

If I am asked to treat of the river, or rather, the ocean of life and the adventure of its voyage in terh to have faith, let me commend to them that nostics as of jurists, Mr Justice Stephen The dreao, is as noble a piece of literature as it is a ht

I dreamt [he says, after Bunyan's fashi+on] that I was in the cabin of a shi+p, handso the objects of the voyage and the principles of navigation

They were contradicting each other eagerly, but each e depended absolutely upon the adoption of his own plan The charts to which they appealed were in many places confused and contradictory They said that they were proclai the best of news, but the substance of it was that e reached port eon and put to death by lingering torments Some, indeed, would receive different treatreed in extolling the wisdon of the country Saddened and confused I escaped to the deck, and found myself somehow enrolled in the crew The prospect was unlike the accounts given in the cabin There was no sun; we had but a faint starlight, and there were occasionally glihts on shore, which yet were pronounced by some of the crew to beto be done was to let the shi+p drive as she would, without trying to keep her on as understood to be her course For the strangest thing on that strange shi+p was the fact that there was such a course Many theories were offered about this, none quite satisfactory; but it was understood that the shi+p was to be steered due north The best and bravest and wisest of the creould dare the ers, even, fro these things together, and noting that the shi+p was obviously fra that there was a port soh I doubted the wisdom of those who professed to know all about it I resolved to do my duty, in the hope that it would turn out to have beenin the mystery by which ere surrounded, and that, at all events, ignorance honestly adorously done, was far better than the shalaring laht from which I had escaped

Was there ever a nobler parable e of the last chapter of _The Adventure of Living_