Complete Works of Howard Pyle

by Howard Pyle

  Having thus at last silenced his clamor, they left him lying where he was, and began hastily setting about the business which they had come prepared for. The parson, to make it more easy to conceal beneath his cassock - cloak, attempted to flatten down the bows of the crown with the wooden mallet which he had brought with them, and which they had just used with such effect, upon the poor old keeper. Another of the party, an old Cromwellian soldier named Parrott, fell to filing the sceptre in two, “for the better convenience of carrying it away in a bag which they had fetched.” Meantime the third had wrapped the orb in a pocket-handkerchief, and had stuffed it in his breeches pocket.

  While they were so engaged, the keeper had somewhat recovered his shattered wits, but knowing that they would probably kill him if he made any further outcry, he lay for the time silently watching them.

  All had gone smoothly with them so far, and perhaps all might have gone smoothly to the end, had there not chanced one of those happenings that used to occur so frequently in the queer old novels of sixty or seventy years ago, but which happen almost never in real life. Mr. Edwards had a son and a son-in-law, who had for some years been away in Flanders, and by some queer crook of chance they both happened at that very day, hour, and minute to return to England and to the Tower. The luck of such an opportune return was as one in a million, and probably it saved the crown of En gland.

  The young man who played the part of the parson’s nephew had not accompanied the others to the jewel-room, but had remained without to give the alarm in case of need — probably excusing himself for not going with the others upon the plea of waiting for the coming of his aunt. As Mr. Edwards the younger and his brother-in-law, Captain Beckman, reached the keeper’s lodgings, they were somewhat surprised to find this young stranger waiting there. They stopped to ask him some questions, and the sound of their voices gave the alarm to the others even before their sentinel had time to warn them of their danger. The thieves had not had time to file the sceptre in two, and so had to leave it, contenting themselves with carrying off the crown and the orb and one or two of the more valuable jewels.

  As soon as they had left the jewel-room, Mr. Edwards -worked the gag out of his mouth, and began to scream “Treason! Murder!” with all his might, and the next moment his daughter ran into the court, crying out that the crown had been stolen, and the whole of that part of the Tower was instantly aroused. But meantime the robbers had reached the drawbridge without being stopped, and they seemed upon the point of escaping, when the warder stationed there ran out to head them off. The parson fired his pistol point-blank at the man, who fell down at the report, though unhurt, and let them all four pass by. They cleared the outer gates beyond without any further challenge, reached the wharf, and made with all speed for St. Katherine’s gate, where four horses stood ready for-mounting. But though the warder had not stopped them, he had so delayed them that Captain Beckman, who had distanced young Edwards, was able to overtake them. The parson, being impeded by his loose cassock, was the hindermost of the four, and him Captain Beckman clutched by the cloak. Thereupon, with an oath, the fugitive turned sharp around, and discharged the second pistol directly in his pursuer’s face. Captain Beckman, seeing his intention, dropped upon his knees, and the bullet passed harmlessly over his head.

  In the fierce struggle that followed, the crown fell into the dirt, where it was afterward picked up by one of the others who came running to Captain Beckman’s aid.

  Several of the jewels had fallen out, but besides that it had suffered but little injury. A valuable pearl was picked up by a sweeper a day or two after, and a diamond was subsequently found by an apprentice. Others of the precious stones which had become dislodged were never again found.

  As soon as the parson saw that the crown was lost to him, he ceased trying to escape, crying out that it was a gallant attempt, for it had been for a crown.

  Parrott, with the orb in his breeches pocket, was also caught. One fine ruby was found to have broken loose from its setting; but it was afterward found among some other things when the man’s pocket was turned inside out.

  The remaining two of the four fugitives reached their horses in safety, and got fairly away from the Tower. One of them, a Thomas Hunt, a son-in-law of Colonel Blood’s, was flung from his horse some little distance beyond the gate, and before he could regain his saddle he was captured, and brought back again to the Tower. The other, the young man who had acted the bridegroom, and who had stood sentry -while his companions were busied in the jewel-house, got safe away, and does not appear in any of the records of the affair that have been transmitted to posterity.

  It was not until the first excitement of the attempted robbery and the capture bad simmered down that it was discovered that the chief of the gang was none other than the famous and desperate Colonel Blood, whose name was even yet ringing from end to end of the land. As soon as this was learned, the news of his capture flew over the town like wildfire, and people came in crowds to the gate of the Tower upon the bare chance of catching a glimpse of the renowned soldier of fortune.

  The report reached even to Whitehall and the ears of the King himself; and when Sir Gilbert Talbot, the Keeper of the Jewels, reached Whitehall bearing the news of the robbery and of the capture of the. criminals, he was informed that the King already knew of the circumstance, and desired to have Blood and Parrott brought to the palace that he might see them and examine them himself.

  It is not known just what passed in the interview that followed. One account has it that the Colonel confessed to the King that he was one of a hand of desperadoes who had sworn to take the life of any man who should injure one of their number, and that he had hidden near by among the reeds with his carbine ready to shoot his Majesty when he should step into the water to bathe, but that the awe inspired by the sight of the naked body of the King’ had dissolved all his courage, and that he had not been able to shoot, or even cock his piece, but could only stand trembling and powerless.

  Not only was he pardoned, but he was taken into royal favor. He became an attendant on the King, and afterward a favorite with the Duke of Buckingham, and always free to the royal ear.

  It is also a part of that same topsyturvy luck of the doughty Colonel’s that his wealth and prosperity should have been his undoing. In some obscure and tangled fashion Colonel Blood became involved in a scandal against the Duke of Buckingham — a scandal of a kind not to he told to modern ears. Whether the horrid accusation against his Grace was true or not true, the result was just the same for Mr. Blood. He became entangled in the gossamer net of the law, and we find the Duke of Buckingham entering an action against him the damages of which were set at £10,000.

  Then the Colonel’s down hill path was as rapid as his rise had been. His court favor was lost; his friends deserted him; ho was ruined financially; and at last, upon the 24th of August, 1680, ho died, and was buried in Tottle Fields.

  THE END

  THE ANGEL AND THE CHILD

  Harper’s New Monthly Magazine May 1900

  CHILDREN DO NOT see the world as men and women behold it. The flowing integument that surrounds the soul is as yet tender and translucent. The light from beyond shines more easily through its filmy veil, and in that light the things of nature are melted into a glamour such as older eyes are too dim to perceive. The world of childhood is newer and more beautiful with life; the sun is more radiant; the ether is more buoyant than in the more sombre and the darker world of after-life.

  Heaven and earth, as it were, touch together, and just beyond the thin and misty veil of separation spirits walk and rustle, and their whisperings sometimes, haply, reach the tender ear without its hearing to understand the words.

  The two spaces are but a hand’s-breadth apart, and it may easily be but a step from one to the other.

  A certain little girl lived entirely alone in her world of childhood. She had neither brother nor sister nor playmate, and she was an orphan, her mother having died before she could remember h
er, and her father living abroad as United States minister at Dresden.

  During the absence of her father upon his official duties the child lived with her grandparents in the country. They lavished almost an excess of care and affection upon her, for not only was she their dead daughter’s daughter, but she was the only child of their only child.

  But it is impossible for any adult soul, unless it be a mother’s, to reach across the gulf of years to the childish soul upon the other side. Only childhood can understand childhood, and it is vain for maturity to hope by an abundance of tenderness to supply the need which only that companionship can fill. The lonely child is only the more pathetic in its loneliness when love and longing strive so hopelessly and so in vain to enter the impassable confines of its solitude.

  There were no other children in the neighborhood, and so the little girl lived her life alone, supplying in her fancy that comradeship of childhood which her life did not give her in reality. The bushes and the trees were peopled, to her imagination, with other children, with whom she talked and played, and of whom she sometimes spoke to her grandmother.

  Among the other amusements which in her loneliness she invented to entertain herself, she used occasionally to go with her dolls into the neighboring woods, where a smoothly sawed tree stump served for a table, a hollow trunk for a cupboard, and fragments of broken china for dishes. Here her imagination would build up for her a world of fancy, peopled by those immaterial being’s whom she called her playmates.

  Sometimes she imagined a fairy-tale such as her grandmother read to her in the evenings from the pages of Grimm or Dasent; the fragments of china became in fancy golden cups and dishes; and she would speak aloud in the leafy silence to voiceless kings and queens, princes and princesses, knights and ladies.

  One time, as she was playing’ thus in the shady solitudes, a strange lady came and asked her what games she was playing. The little girl, abashed by the unexpected appearance of the stranger, gave only some half-articulated reply. But the lady smiled very kindly upon her.

  “Tell me,” she said, “was it not a fairytale you were playing?”

  “Yes.”

  “And would you not like really to see the golden plates and dishes you were pretending?”

  Again the child replied in the affirmative. Thereupon the lady touched the broken pieces of china with her linger, transforming the fragments of shattered porcelain into chalices and plates of shining gold — a realization of the fairy-story which the little girl had been imagining that afternoon.

  Again the lady smiled. “This,” she said, calling the little girl by her name, “is the soul of the broken china. And now we will pretend that I am a fairy queen come to you from a distant kingdom.”

  Thereupon, seating herself beside the tree stump (which had become covered as with a golden cloth). the lady entered into the play almost as though she herself were a child.

  After a while, when the play began to grow cold, the lady touched the golden plates and goblets, and once more they became fragments of broken china.

  Then she told the little girl many things about the children that, lived in the land whence she came — of their sports, of their games, of their studies, of their amusements — and the little; girl listened, feeding all the time a great pleasure in her new friend.

  The strange lady remained until the falling of the afternoon; then she went away, and the child returned home once more.

  She told her grandmother all that had happened to her, and what the strange lady had said and done. The grandmother questioned her closely as to the appearance of her companion of the afternoon, but made no further comment upon the singular story. It seemed to her that, maybe the child had dreamed what had been seen, but nevertheless she was tilled with a wonder and a stillness that were almost like a great fear, for the description of the appearance and of the action and speech of the strange visitor made it seem as though they could belong only to one soul.

  The little orphaned girl never knew that the strange lady with whom she had been playing was her own mother, and the grandmother never told her.

  BARTRAM AND HIS GARDEN

  Harper’s New Monthly Magazine Feb 1880

  THAT glamour of Antiquity which endows the past with such interest is derived, not from the lapse of years greater or less, but from the fact that such time was the season of the implantation and the germination of ideas that have since produced the fruit of knowledge by which the present is enriched; so, inversely, that time is to us Antiquity which was the period of such a seed-time and growth. A century ago, to the American, possesses all that aroma of romance which the age of Elizabeth holds for the English. The landing of the first settlers — the beginning of all things for us — appears almost as remote in time as the landing of the Normans in England.

  It is this atmosphere of the past which surrounds the name of John Bartram, the father of American botany and natural science. It is through this period of seedtime that his value, great as it was, becomes doubly enhanced. Few people, comparatively speaking, now know anything of John Bartram, the friend and constant correspondent of Peter Collinson (Royal Botanist to King George III.) the intimate of Benjamin Franklin, and, through his letters, of Sir Hans Sloane, the fellow of the learned Dr. Gronovius, and even of the great Linnæus himself, who pronounced Bartram “the greatest of living natural botanists.” Those engaged in the science of which he was the pioneer know of him perhaps — a few antiquarians and others, such as by accident have come to knowledge of him; but beyond these there are few indeed that know anything of the man whose keen eye has pierced the husk of nature to the very kernel of life within.

  “One day I was busy in holding my plough (for thou seest I am but a simple Digitized by without thy trying to understand one of its simplest leaves!’ This thought awakened my curiosity, for these are not the thoughts to which I had been accustomed. I returned to my plough once more; but this new desire for inquiry into the perfections the Lord hath granted to all about us did not quit my mind; nor hath it since.”

  Thus spoke the venerable John Bartram, in his later years of ripeness, the fruit-time and harvest of a busy life of usefulness and labor. The “pretty flower” plucked beneath the shadow of the way-side tree awakened in his heart, as did the Scottish daisy in the heart of Burns, aspirations, thoughts, and desires such as had not before disturbed the sluggish surface of his life. But how different the awakening; the one to the actual, the tangible, the real; the other to the ideal, the indefinite, the poetic; but as the daisy appealed not to the Scotch ploughman, but to the poet within, so also it converted the sturdy Pennsylvanian Quaker farmer into the scientist, the fellow of the greatest intellects of his day.

  It is a curious fact that of the first botanists of that day, Peter Collinson, Dr. Fothergill, John Bartram, and Humphrey Marshall were all Quakers, the last two Pennsylvanians; and it is interesting to consider the bent of mind that caused such to be the case. Even of later years our chief botanists have had more than the relative amount of Quakers in their ranks. ploughman), and being aweary, I sat me beneath the shade of a tree to rest myself. I cast mine eyes upon a daisy. I plucked the pretty flower, and viewing it with more closeness than common farmers are wont to bestow upon a weed, I observed therein many curious and distinct parts, each perfect in itself, and each in its way tending to enhance the beauty of the flower. ‘What a shame,’ said my mind, or something within my mind— ‘what a shame that thou hast spent so many years in the ruthless destroying of that which the Lord in His infinite goodness hath made so perfect in its humble place, John Bartram was never a voluminous writer; self-educated, and from inefficient books, he seems always to have handled the pen with a certain stiffness. In his letters he occasionally breaks into a really fine paragraph; but in spite of a certain directness and freedom from verbosity, he evidently does not feel at liberty with his inkhorn. It was this fact, doubtless, that tended to lose in the dust of the past a name that otherwise would have held its place with t
he greatest. But his life was of inestimable value, pouring its richness into the store-houses of learning in Europe, contented that the fruit of his labors should live, though his name should itself pass away.

  Not far south from Gray’s Ferry, in the — suburbs of Philadelphia, upon the Schuylkill River, in a district bearing the Indian name of Kingsessing, stands a grove of curious trees of many varieties, native and foreign, sloping gently toward the east and south, terraced until it meets the Schuylkill. At the peak of the slope perches a house of gray hewn stone, quaint, old-fashioned, and cozy. The northern end is covered with a dense mat of ivy that seems to have grown into the very pores of the rock of which the house is built, the stems of which have long since become a solid mass of woody fibre. From out the thick clustering leaves of the vine two windows peep like knowing old eyes. The south end is nearly free from vines, and is pierced toward the east with two large windows, the sills thereof curiously carved in stone-work. Between these two windows, upper and lower, a square block of stone has been smoothed, and carved with this inscription, the confession of a faith more austerely simple than even that of his co-religionists of that date:

  TIS GOD ALONE, ALMIGHTY LORD,

  THE HOLY ONE BY ME ADORED.