Fill up the gaps and tell all the tale, poet with the dreamy eyes,
eyes that can pierce the gloom--poet with the mobile lips, lips that
can speak with rhythmic utterance the revelations of the future or
the past.
All the lonely ones, and all the childless ones, did not turn parsons
we may be sure; yet it is good for us to believe that John
Bonington's was not a solitary instance of a man coming out of the
furnace of affliction softened, not hardened; purified, not merely
blistered, by the fire.
Was Thomas Porter at Little Cornard somewhat past his prime when the
plague came? It spared him and his old wife, it seems; but for his
sons and daughters, the hope of his eld and the pride of his manhood,
where were they? He and the good wife, cowering over the turf fire,
did they dare to talk with quivering lips and clouded eyes about the
days when the little ones had clambered up to the strong father's
knee, or tiny arms were held out to the rough yeoman as he reached
his home? "Oh! the desolation and the loneliness. No fault of thine
dear wife--nor mine. It is the Lord, let Him do what seemeth Him
good!"
Thomas Porter had a neighbour, one John Stone, a man of small
substance: he owned a couple of acres under the lord; poor land it
was, hardly paying for the tillage, and I suppose the cottage upon it
was his own, so far as any man's copyhold dwelling was his own in
those days.
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