Mr and Mrs Glegg at Home
IN order to see Mr and Mrs Glegg at home, we must ehe town of St Oggs - that venerable town with the redfluted roofs and the broad warehouse gables, where the black ships uhemselves of their burthens from the far north, and carry away, in exge, the precious inland products, the well-crushed cheese and the soft fleeces, which my refined readers have doubtless bee acquainted with through the medium of the best classic pastorals. It is one of those old, old towns, which impress one as a tinuation and outgrowth of nature as much as the s of the bower birds or the winding galleries of the white ants: a town which carries the traces of its long growth and history, like a millennial tree, and has sprung up and developed in the same spot between the river and the low hill from the time when the Roman legions turheir backs on it from the camp on the hill-side, and the longhaired sea-kings camp up the river and looked with fierce, eager eyes at the fatness of the land. It is a town `familiar with fotten years. The shadow of the Saxon hero-king still walks there fitfully, reviewing the ses of his youth and lovetime, and is met by the gloomier shadow of the dreadful heathen Dane who was stabbed in the midst of his warriors by the sword of an invisible avenger and who rises on autumn evenings like a white mist from his tumulus on the hill and hovers in the court of the old Hall by the river-side - the spot where he was thus miraculously slain in the days before the old Hall was built. It was the Normans who began to build that fine old Hall, which is like the town - telling of the thoughts and hands of widely-sundered geions; but it is all so old that we look with loving pardon at its insistencies, and are well tent that they who built the stone oriel and they who built the gothic facade and towers of fi small brick-work with trefoil or, and the windows and battlements defined with stone, did not sacrilegiously pull down the a half-timbered body with its oak-roofed baing-hall.
But older even than this old Hall is Perhaps the bit of wall now built into the belfry of the parish churd said to be a remnant of the inal chapel dedicated to St Ogg, the patron saint of this aown, of whose history I possess several manuscript versions. I ine to the briefest, since if it should not be wholly true, it is at least likely to tain the least falsehood. `Ogg the son of Beorl, says my private hagiographer, `was a boatman who gained a sty living by ferrying passengers across the river Floss. And it came to pass one evening when the winds were high, that there sat moaning by the bring of the river a woman with a child in her arms; and she was clad in rags, and had a worn and withered look. And she craved to be rowed across the river. And the men thereabout questioned her, and said `Wherefore dost thou desire to cross the river? Tarry till the m, and take shelter here for the night: so shalt thou be wise, and not foolish. Still she went on to mourn and crave. But Ogg the son of Beorl came up, and said, `I will ferry thee across: it is enough that thy heart needs it. And he ferried her across. And it came to pass wheepped ashore, that her rags were turned into robes of flowing white, and her face became bright with exceediy and there was a glory around it so that she shed a light oer like the moon in its brightness. And she said `Ogg, the son of Beorl, thou art blessed, in that thou didst not question and wrah the hearts need but