people, anywhere, anyhow, in a sort of hurry and
makeshift:--Flos Parietis! thus carelessly plucked forth. Emerald
Uthwart was born on such a day "at Chase Lodge, in this parish, and
died there."

See him then as he stands! counting now the hours that remain, on the
eve of that first emigration, and look away next at the other place,
which through centuries has been forming to receive him; from those
garden-beds, now at their richest, but where all is so winsomely
little, to that place of "great matters," great stones, great memories
out of reach. Why! the Uthwarts had scarcely had more memories than
their woods, noiselessly deciduous; or their prehistoric, entirely
unprogressive, unrecording forefathers, in or before the days of the
Druids. Centuries of almost "still" life--of birth, death, [204] and
the rest, as merely natural processes--had made them and their home
what we find them. Centuries of conscious endeavour, on the other
hand, had builded, shaped, and coloured the place, a small cell, which
Emerald Uthwart was now to occupy; a place such as our most
characteristic English education has rightly tended to "find itself a
house" in--a place full, for those who came within its influence, of a
will of its own. Here everything, one's very games, have gone by rule
onwards from the dim old monastic days, and the Benedictine school for
novices with the wholesome severities which have descended to our own
time. Like its customs,--there's a book in the cathedral archives with
the names, for centuries Past, of the "scholars" who have missed church
at the proper times for going there--like its customs, well-worn yet
well-preserved, time-stained, time-engrained, time-mellowed, the
venerable Norman or English stones of this austere, beautifully
proportioned place look like marble, to which Emerald's softly nurtured
being, his careless wild-growth must now adapt itself, though somewhat
painfully recoiling from contact with what seems so hard also, and
bright, and cold. From his native world of soft garden touches,
carnation and rose (they had been everywhere in those last weeks),
where every one did just what he liked, he was passed now to this world
of grey stone; and here it was always the decisive word [205] of
command. That old warrior Uthwart's record in the church at home, so
fine, yet so wretched, so unspeakably great and difficult! seemed
written here everywhere around him, as he stood feeling himself fit
on