Great Britain -- History -- Elizabeth, 1558-1603 -- Fiction
Anthony Norris, who was now about fourteen, went up to King's College,
Cambridge, in October. He was closeted long with his father the night
before he left, and received from him much sound religious advice and
exhortation; and in the morning, after an almost broken-hearted good-bye
from Isabel, he rode out with his servant following on another horse and
leading a packhorse on the saddle of which the falcons swayed and
staggered, and up the curving drive that led round into the village
green. He was a good-hearted and wholesome-minded boy, and left a real
ache behind him in the Dower House.
Isabel indeed ran up to his room, after she had seen his feathered cap
disappear at a trot through the gate, leaving her father in the hall; and
after shutting and latching the door, threw herself on his bed, and
sobbed her heart out. They had never been long separated before. For the
last three years he had gone over to the Rectory morning by morning to be
instructed by Mr. Dent; but now, although he would never make a great
scholar, his father thought it well to send him up to Cambridge for two
or three years, that he might learn to find his own level in the world.
Anthony himself was eager to go. If the truth must be told, he fretted a
little against the restraints of even such a moderate Puritan household
as that of his father's. It was a considerable weariness to Anthony to
kneel in the hall on a fresh morning while his father read, even though
with fervour and sincerity, long extracts from "Christian Prayers and
Holy Meditations," collected by the Reverend Henry Bull, when the real
world, as Anthony knew it, laughed and rippled and twinkled outside in
the humming summer air of the lawn and orchard; or to have to listen to
godly discourses, however edifying to elder persons, just at the time
when the ghost-moth was beginning to glimmer in the dusk, and the heavy
trout to suck down his supper in the glooming pool in the meadow below
the house.
His very sports, too, which his father definitely encouraged, were
obviously displeasing to the grave divines who haunted the house so often
from Saturday to Monday, and spoke of high doctrinal matters at
meal-times, when, so Anthony thought, lighter subjects should prevail.
They were not interested in his horse, and Anthony never felt quite the
same again towards one good minister who in a moment of severity called
Eliza, the glorious peregrine that sat on the boy's wrist and shook her
bells, a "vanity." And so Anthony trotted off happy enough on his way to
Cambridge, of which he had heard much from Mr. Dent; and where, although
there too were divines and theology, there were boys as well who acted
plays, hunted with the hounds, and did not call high-bred hawks
"vanities."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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