num_pages: 140
description:  CONTENTS: Part 1 - The Bright BoyChapter 1Chapter 2Chapter 3Part 2 - The Tree of LifeChapter 1Chapter 2Chapter 3Part 3 - Opening the DoorPart 4 - The Mariage of PanurgePart 5 - The Holy ThingsPart 6 - PsychologyPart 7 - The TuraniansPart 8 - The Rose GardenPart 9 - The CeremonyPart 10 - The Soldiers' RestPart 11 - The Happy ChildrenPart 12 - The Cosy RoomPart 13 - Munitions of WarPart 14 - The Great Return1. The Rumour of the Marvellous2. Odours of Paradise3. A Secret in a Secret Place4. The Ringing of the Bell5. The Rose of Fire6. Olwen's Dream7. The Mass of The Sangraal A SELECTION FROM: Part 1: The Bright Boy Young Joseph Last having finally gone down from Oxford wondered a good deal what he was to do next and for the years following next. He was an orphan from early boyhood both his parents having died of typhoid within a few days of each other when Joseph was ten years old and he remembered very little of Dunham where his father ended a long line of solicitors practising in the place since 1707. The Lasts had once been very comfortably off. They had intermarried now and again with the gentry of the neighbourhood and did a good deal of the county business managing estates collecting rents officiating as stewards for several manors living generally in a world of quiet but snug prosperity rising to their greatest height perhaps during the Napoleonic Wars and afterwards. And then they began to decline not violently at all but very gently so that it was many years before they were aware of the process that was going on slowly surely. Economists no doubt understand very well how the country and the country town gradually became less important soon after the Battle of Waterloo; and the causes of the decay and change which vexed Cobbett so sadly as he saw or thought he saw the life and strength of the land being sucked up to nourish the monstrous excrescence of London. Anyhow even before the railways came the assembly rooms of the country towns grew dusty and desolate the county families ceased to come to their town houses for the winter season and the little theatres where Mrs. Siddons and Grimaldi had appeared in their divers parts rarely opened their doors and the skilled craftsmen the clock-makers and the furniture makers and the like began to drift away to the big towns and to the capital city. So it was with Dunham. Naturally the fortunes of the Lasts sank with the fortunes of the town; and there had been speculations which had not turned out well and people spoke of a heavy loss in foreign bonds. When Joseph's father died it was found that there was enough to educate the boy and keep him in strictly modest comfort and not much more. He had his home with an uncle who lived at Blackheath and after a few years at Mr. Jones's well-known preparatory school he went to Merchant Taylors and thence to Oxford. He took a decent degree (2nd in Greats) and then began that wondering process as to what he was to do with himself. His income would keep him in chops and steaks with an occasional roast fowl and three or four weeks on the Continent once a year. If he liked he could do nothing but the prospect seemed tame and boring. He was a very decent Classical scholar with something more than the average schoolmaster's purely technical knowledge of Latin and Greek and professional interest in them: still schoolmastering seemed his only clear and obvious way of employing himself....
language: English
title: Holy Terrors
publisher: Penguin Books