After a time there will be a rainbow. Through the bars of my
prison I can see the catkins thick and sallow-grey on the willows across
the field, visible even at that distance; so great the change in a few
days, the hand of spring grows firm and takes a strong grasp of the
hedges. My prison bars are but a sixteenth of an inch thick; I could snap
them with a fillip--only the window-pane, to me as impenetrable as the
twenty-foot wall of the Tower of London. A cart has just gone past
bearing a strange load among the carts of spring; they are talking of
poling the hops. In it there sat an old man, with the fixed stare, the
animal-like eye, of extreme age; he is over ninety. About him there were
some few chairs and articles of furniture, and he was propped against a
bed. He was being moved--literally carted--to another house, not home,
and he said he could not go without his bed; he had slept on it for
seventy-three years. Last Sunday his son--himself old--was carted to the
churchyard, as is the country custom, in an open van; to-day the father,
still living, goes to what will be to him a strange land. His home is
broken up--he will potter no more with maize for the chicken; the gorse
hedges will become solid walls of golden bloom, but there will never
again be a spring for him. It is very hard, is it not, at ninety? It is
not the tyranny of any one that has done it; it is the tyranny of
circumstance, the lot of man. The song of the Greeks is full of sorrow;
man was to them the creature of grief, yet theirs was the land of violets
and pellucid air.
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