All Men are GhostsJacks, L. P. (Lawrence Pearsall)
Philosophy
All Men are Ghosts
Jacks, L. P. (Lawrence Pearsall)
Short stories; Supernatural -- Fiction
I also managed to take several interesting photographs from the rear;
and (may the saints forgive him!) a young gentleman of my acquaintance
once attempted to snapshot the hinder parts of Jeremy while in church.
Unfortunately the light was bad, and the negative proved a failure.
Otherwise my poetical friend, for whom I intended the photograph, would
certainly have found in it material for a new poem. Be it recorded that
Jeremy when engaged in devotion did not kneel, but stretched his body
forward from the seat to the book-rest, presenting his back to the
heavens and his face to the inner regions of the earth; and, as his body
was very long and the pew very wide, the back formed a solid and
substantial bridge over which you might have trundled a wheelbarrow
laden with turnips. No photograph, indeed, save one of the cinematograph
order, the apparatus for which was too large to lie concealed beneath
the young gentleman's waistcoat, would have reproduced the creepings,
ripplings, and dimplings of the farmer's coat. These gave animation to
the picture; but even without them, the mere contour of the mass, thrust
upwards like the back of a diving whale, was a spectacle of vigour and
concentrated purpose of which my poetical friend would not have lost the
significance.
Jeremy was the oldest of the Duke's tenantry, and the land he farmed,
which was of high quality throughout, had been held by his father, his
grandfather, his great-grandfather, and by ancestors of yet remoter
date. If there is any calling in which heredity is of importance to
success it is surely the farmer's, and Jeremy was fully conscious that
he "had it in the blood," and recognised the debt he owed to his fathers
before him.
People are wont to criticise the old-fashioned farmer as a stiff and
unadaptable person; but what struck me about Jeremy, who was
old-fashioned enough, was the adaptiveness and flexibility of his mind
in dealing with the ever-varying conditions the farmer has to face. He
had an extraordinary instinct for doing the right thing at the right
time, and handled his land as though it were a living thing, with a kind
of unconscious tact which seemed to me the exact opposite to that blind
and mechanical following of habit which so often, but so mistakenly, is
said to be the standing fault of his class. Obstinate and incredulous as
he seemed to the new teachings of veterinary or agricultural science, I
yet noticed that Jeremy managed to absorb enough of these things to
produce the results he desired; and though he never absorbed as much of
them as the experts required, his crops were always larger and his stock
healthier than those of his neighbours whose farming was strictly
according to the modern card.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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