The Soldier of the Valley. Nelson Lloyd
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Nelson Lloyd
The Soldier of the Valley
Published by Good Press, 2019
EAN 4064066179366
Table of Contents
They called to me as a boy ……… Frontispiece
They called to me as a boy … … … Frontispiece
"Welcome home—thrice welcome!"
Tim and I had stopped our ploughs to draw lots and he had lost
He did not stop to hear my answer
Swearing terrible oaths that he will never return
No answer came from the floor above
The tiger story
He had a last look at Black Log
"He pumped me dry"
"Nanny is likely to get one of her religious spells and quit work"
I was back in my prison
"'At my sover-sover-yne's will'"
Perry Thomas stands confronting the English warrior
"You'll begin to think you ain't there at all"
I saw a girl on the store porch
Aaron Kallaberger
Leander
"Her name was Pinky Binn, a dotter of the house of Binn, the Binns of Turkey Walley"
William had felt the hand of "Doogulus"
"Aren't you coming?" young Colonel seemed to say
Sat little Colonel, wailing
The main thing was proper nursing
Well, ain't he tasty
"But there are no ghosts," I argued
"Of course it hurts me a bit here"
"An seein' a light in the room, I looked in"
Tip Pulsifer leaned on my gate
The horse went down
"And I'm his widder"
Then Tim came
Old Captain
When we three sit by the fire
THE SOLDIER OF THE VALLEY
I
I was a soldier. I was a hero. You notice my tenses are past. I am a simple school-teacher now, a prisoner in Black Log. There are no bars to my keep, only the wall of mountains that make the valley; and look at them on a clear day, when sunshine and shadow play over their green slopes, when the clouds all white and gold swing lazily in the blue above them, and they speak of freedom and of life immeasurable. There are no chains to my prison, no steel cuffs to gall the limbs, no guards to threaten and cow me. Yet here I stay year after year. Here I was born and here I shall die.
I am a traveller. In my mind I have gone the world over, and those wanderings have been unhampered by the limitations of mere time, for I know my India of the First Century as well as that of the Twentieth, and the China of Confucius is as real to me as that of Kwang Su. Without stirring from my little porch down here in the valley I have pierced the African jungles and