Up In Ardmuirland

PERSONAL

   Forest and meadow and hill, and the steel-blue rim of the ocean

  Lying silent and sad, in the afternoon shadows and sunshine.

          (_Longfellow--"Miles Standish"_)

Val and I, being twins, have always been looked upon as inseparables. True, we have been often forced apart during life's course; yet, somehow, we have always managed to drift back again into the old companionship which Nature seems to have intended in bringing us into the world together.

Boyhood and youth, as long as school life lasted, slipped by with never a parting.  The crux came when we were old enough to choose our respective paths in life.  It appeared that Val, although he had never before breathed a word to me--whatever he may have done to Dad—had thoroughly determined to be a priest if he could.  I had never felt the ghost of a vocation in that direction, so here came the parting of the ways.  Val went to college, and I was left inconsolable.

But I was not allowed to nurse my griefs; plans had been made in my regard also, it appeared.

"Ted," said Dad quite abruptly one day, "you'll have to go to Bonn . That'll be the best place for you, since Oxford is out of the question. You've got to take my place some day, and you mustn't grow up an absolute dunce.  Atfield" (an old school-chum of his) "is well pleased with the place for his boy, Bill, so you may get ready to travel back with him next week, when the vacation finishes."

In those days (how long ago I almost blush to record) Catholics were not allowed access to our own universities as they now are, and we Flemings were Catholics to the core, and of old staunch Jacobites, as befitted our Scottish race and name.