Along the side of the Down the poppies grow in a scarlet streak—like blood. They splash the growing corn, and they flower too in the chalky aridity of the quarry outside the field. They are the brave pennons of July—gay and blood-red, the colour of life pulsing and triumphant, the colour of the field’s salvation and the earth’s victory. * * * * * James Weller “got salvation,” and in the year 1842 was published at Robertsbridge in Sussex, a little book called “The Wonders of Free Grace.” It is the story of Weller’s short life—packed into many halting, ungrammatical sentences, between dull brown covers, the colour of the lanes he trod. Yet if things were to appear in their hidden reality that book would be seen printed and bound in poppy scarlet, for it is written in blood—the heart’s blood of the “little man of Kent” and the Precious Blood which redeemed that heart and made it new. “I was born in sin.” There is something Pauline in the opening phrase, which, however, means no more than that his parents were “very ignorant of the power of godliness.” They were poor simple people, the father a farm labourer earning a lean, uncertain living on the farms round Headcorn. Little James was a puny child, terrified with dreams. A frail constitution and a hard life worked an excitable mind to the edge of religious mania, though in those days he had learned none of the jargon of damnation which Calvinism was to teach him later—he was a child of the Church, which provided for his physical as well as for his spiritual needs, since his family seem to have “come on the Parish” at a very early date. When his father died they were left quite destitute, and the rigorous old Poor Law “put out” the wretched James to work on various farms. The spiritual history of those years reads like the blacker parts of “Grace Abounding”—he was convinced that he had committed the Sin against the Holy Ghost. Many times he felt urged to take his own life, and he seems to have been unable to pass a pond or brook or well without contemplating in it release from the existence which was fast becoming unbearable. But he lived on, alternating frightful impulses towards suicide and dreams of a devouring hell, with hopes of release, of discovery and union—sometimes coming to him through the ministrations of the various sects in which he sought relief, sometimes in the pages (opened with ritual casualness) of that Book which, however, often scattered its comfort with trumpet-blasts of judgment.