Up and Down the Road. By ALEXANDER ANDREWS Valley of Poppies, The. By the Author of "Christopher Kenrick" and PAGE XXIII.-While I jingled my Glass with the Lawyer's in the City. XXIV.—" And the stately Ships go on, to their Haven under the Hill" XXV." But Oh! for the Touch of a Vanished Hand; and the Sound of a Voice that is Still" Within and Without. A Series of Mosaics from the City. By D: THE GENTLEMAN'S MAGAZINE JUNE, 1871. THE VALLEY OF POPPIES. BY THE AUTHOR OF "CHRISTOPHER KENRICK" AND "THE TALLANTS OF BARTON." CHAPTER I. SUMMERDALE-IN-THE-WATER. AM the Perpetual Curate of Summerdale-in-theWater. A few years ago I gave to the world a fragment of my autobiography. It consisted of only a few short pages. Some of my friends are anxious that I should extend the narrative. I hope a reverie which seemed fresh and interesting when confined to one chapter may not become monotonous by extensive multiplication. My first impressions of Summerdale were filled with dismal forebodings. The silence which almost made itself heard, the dead calm which the senses could feel, depressed me to the very soul. I could hardly breathe. I was hemmed in, shut out from all the world, an exile without hope, a prisoner having no chance of reprieve. The three bells of the old church that chimed on Sundays were funereal. VOL. VII., N.S. 1871. B The moss-grown village was the grave of dead hopes and aspirations. Oblivion had cast her mantle over the valley. It was the sleepy hollow of fairy tales, the lost village, the border-land of life, alley of Poppies. I persisted in seeing the image of Somnus in stone saint over the church porch. The son of Erebus and Nox nad set up his black-curtained throne of feathers in that crumbling 1ifice. It was his cavern. When I entered it I should see the cams standing by him. A few weeks' experience dispelled the darkest of these images, but ce ard sadness still peopled the village with gloomy shadows. not good enough nor pure enough for an anchorite, to settle and devote heart and soul unto one service. Not pure enough; ⚫ght better say not sufficiently repentant and believing; not enough in my faith, not submissive and resigned. I chafed a.nst the imaginary barriers of my prison. The score of sleepy nople who sat and nodded through the morning service provoked n.y melancholy and did not excite my zeal. The Squire on the hill was a continual thorn in my flesh. His riches rebuked my poverty. I hated him because he had been successful in the battle. His hes trampled upon the memories of my past life until the dust of thein choked me. I revenged myself now and the: in a sermon upon Dives and Lazarus. The Squire did not come to church regularly, but the family pew was always occupied, and I knew that ry sermons were discussed over dinner. I was asked to dine Sunday after Sunday. It flattered my pride to refuse every invitation to feast at the rich man's table. I would rather have died of starvation than humble myself to eat of the crumbs with Lazarus. My heart was full of bitterness. Jasper, Melchior, and Balthazar had no charm for me. They had neither myrrh, nor frankincense, nor gold for the fortune-scourged curate. I had remembered their names, and sung my Fubilate Deo in the old days, but had never been exempt from the falling sickness. I was indeed a miserable sinner. All this was in the early days of my fall, when I turned my back upon the world, because I had no choice but to run. I had fought and struggled in the conflict. Nothing daunted, I had set my lance in rest, and plunged into the battle, fighting, not with the sword of the spirit, but with the weapons of the flesh. Youth is hard to mould into wisdom and soberness. My father made a mistake when he had me educated for the He was an artist in a Church. cathedral city. They called the place Wulstan. "Poor, pretty, and proud," is the motto which satire has ordained for the people of this western land. I call to mind the charm of my boyish life in the dull old town before I plunged into the battle beyond. Of this anon. My father, I say, was an artist in that same cathedral city. He proud, and eventually came under the narrowness and vanity of the clerical influence. I must be educated for the Church; and so I was, heaven forgive me! But I am wandering from Summerdale, where I came when he battle was at an end-over for good, so far as I was concerned. had fought and lost, done battle with the foe and been defeated...I fled and came to Summerdale. Those first hot days of my appointment are long since past, and I sit by the river and God that I came here to be at rest. The chimes which funereal just after the battle, are now tender, gentle music to my s and the moss on the fountain is not softer than the quiet, pea path of my life. Some of the select few who nodded over my fist sermon have dropped away quietly to their rest. The Squire is g and gentle now. He sits with me in the porched doorway of the hall, and talks of his early days. His horses no longer lacerate my early hores. Indeed, there is a mild chestnut cob which carries he now and then to the country town, but these are very rare occasions, and I come back again, with thankfulness and gratitude, to the slumbering river and the mosses of Summerdale-in-the-Water. Fucundi acti labores. I am not a scholar in the general acceptation of the term. I know little Greek and less Latin. That was one of the reasons why I was overcome in the fight. Some men have a faculty for languages: I was not born to be learned in this direction, but I know the Fathers almost by heart nevertheless-Hippolytus, Irena as, Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, Theophilus, Clementine. regarded this exercise as a duty when I found my mind more than usually occupied with the holiday books of fancy and imagination. Summerdale is just outside the world, on the borders of life, at the outskirts of the battle-field. I sometimes catch faint sounds of the din of the conflict. The blare of the trumpet and the rumble of the drum now and then reach me, on the wings of the western wind. Occasionally brother soldiers who have been wounded in the battle, friends of the old days, comrades in arms, find their way to Summerdale. They come back to me at long intervals; come back with changed faces and changed manners; come back when their dreams are over, baffled, broken, defeated. Rarely indeed do any but the confounded find me out; the maimed and wounded; they who have fainted by the way and fallen; the deserted of fortune. The rich and victorious have lived out of the old ways. They have gone beyond I the old associations. They have been triumphant. They have acquired power. The world is at their feet, subdued, vanquished, overcome, so far as their limited wisdom understands victory. These warriors are not for Summerdale. They forget the Perpetual Curate who rode forth with them in the fray, pushed on by the same hopes, stimulated by a kindred ambition. No, it is in the hour of defeat that my old acquaintances and friends come back to me. When they have a fall, they think of the retreat outside the world, and its gray-bearded exile. A fellow feeling jogs their memory, and they “hunt me up" as they call it. When finance has hit them; when the bishop has died without promoting them; when they have sent their last picture to be rejected at the Academy; when their books have failed; when the woman they loved has proved unfaithful; then they think of the old days, the old friends, the schoolboy companions, the college chums, of early dreams and early hopes, and of other men who have suffered. Then, remembering the Perpetual Curate of Summerdale-in-the-Water, they "hunt him up," to shake hands again, and re-fight their battles over his winter fire, or recount their strange, eventful histories in the sunlight of the valley, while the bees hum a soft and lulling accompaniment to the more pathetic passages of their personal stories of the battle. STRANGE is the news which these friends of my youth bring out of the world, from the battle-field of life. I see the Times now and then, many days after publication. It is a romance to me. Its strange stories are like events I have read of in other days. The journal is a despatch from the war. I note its list of killed and wounded, and I look up from its blurred and blotted columns to gaze upon the long winding river, and think of the land that lies beyond. But my friends who hunt me up, they are waifs and strays of the fight itself. They have been in the conflict, and that recently. They know all about the marches and countermarches, the sieges and capitulations. They have encountered the giants single-handed. They have seen the sons of Cœlus and Terra, and can describe their horrible features. They have measured clubs and swords with them. Marvellous are the stories they tell. Sometimes I think my poor wounded friends multiply their foes, as Falstaff did; but it is long since |