Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. WHITHER IN THE TIME OF THOMAS, THIRD VISCOUNT, I HAD PRECEDED HIM AS PAGE TO ISABELLA. Coming up to London again some short time after this retreat, the Lord Castlewood despatched a retainer of his to a little cottage in the village of Ealing. near to London, where for some time had dwelt an old French refugee, by name Mr. Pastoureau, one of those whom the persecution of the Huguenots by the French king had brought over to this country. With this old man lived a little lad who went by the name of Henry Thomas. He remembered to have lived in another place a short time before, near to London, too, amongst looms and spinning-wheels, and a great deal of psalm-singing and church-going, and a whole colony of Frenchmen. There he had a dear, dear friend, who died, and whom he called aunt. She used to visit him in his dreams sometimes; and her face, though it was homely, was a thousand times dearer to him than that of Mrs. Pastoureau, Bon Papa Pastour- eau’s new wife, who came to live with him after aunt went away. And there, at Spittlefiekls, as it used to be called, lived Uncle George, who was a weaver too, but used to tell Harry that he was a little gentleman, and that iiis father was a Captain, and his mother an angel. When he said so, Bon Papa used to look up from the loom, where he was embroidering beautiful silk flowers, and say,
Angel ! she belongs to the Babylonish scarlet woman. Bon Papa was always talking of the scarlet woman. He had a little room where he always used to preach and sing hymns out of his great old nose. Little Harry did not like preaching; he liked better the fine stories which aunt used to tell him. Bon Papa’s wife never told him pretty stories; she quarrelled with Uncle George, and he went away. After this Harry’s Bon Papa and h…