The Youth of Parnassus, and Other StoriesSmith, Logan Pearsall
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The Youth of Parnassus, and Other Stories
Smith, Logan Pearsall
Short stories; University of Oxford -- Fiction
"Then came the Restoration, and almost the last event that Wood records
is the revival of Catholicism under James II. Wood himself was suspected
of being a Papist; his writings had made him enemies, and before he died
he was expelled from the University, and his book burned by order of the
Vice-Chancellor's Court."
"And yet, on the whole, his life was a happy one," Sutton said, writing,
it was plain, with a certain envy for the tranquil occupations and
lettered tastes of the old Oxford antiquary.
XVII.
The next two letters that Foley found (and they were the last) were
dated in the Long Vacation, nearly a year later. Either Sutton had not
written again for some time, or Foley had lost the letters. It was the
American's third summer in England; as before, he had stayed in Oxford.
He described the quiet afternoons he spent in the College garden; how he
seemed to be alone with Oxford and the past, and how even the city
noises, which came in over the walls--the rattle of carts, the shrill,
faint voices of newsboys, crying the world's events--only added a deeper
hush to the stillness and solitude within, the sunlight on the grass,
the shadows of the trees.
He remembered how homesick he had been the first summer he had spent in
Oxford, and how he had longed to go back. But now that his work was
almost finished, and he was soon to go to America, he could not help
admitting that he shrank a little from it--felt a certain reluctance,
after all. He would watch, as he had watched before, the tourists who
now and then came into the quiet garden. Then he had enjoyed seeing
them, and wished he could talk to them; but now!...
And one day some people whom he had known in Indiana came in. He spoke
to them, showed them about, and tried to be friendly, and yet they
seemed so far away somehow! He hated himself for it, and tried to
believe that it was all the fault of Oxford and its fastidious
standards; he had let himself be too much influenced, but when he got
back to Parnassus again, he hoped he should see things as he used to see
them, and feel the same towards the Slocums and all his old friends.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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