The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Dwelling Place of Light, Volume 1
by Winston Churchill

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Title: The Dwelling Place of Light, Volume 1

Author: Winston Churchill

Release Date: October 15, 2004 [EBook #3646]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE DWELLING PLACE OF LIGHT, ***

Produced by Pat Castevans and David Widger

THE DWELLING-PLACE OF LIGHT

By WINSTON CHURCHILL

Volume 1.

1917

CHAPTER I

In this modern industrial civilization of which we are sometimes wont to
boast, a certain glacier-like process may be observed. The bewildered,
the helpless--and there are many--are torn from the parent rock, crushed,
rolled smooth, and left stranded in strange places. Thus was Edward
Bumpus severed and rolled from the ancestral ledge, from the firm granite
of seemingly stable and lasting things, into shifting shale; surrounded
by fragments of cliffs from distant lands he had never seen. Thus, at
five and fifty, he found himself gate-keeper of the leviathan Chippering
Mill in the city of Hampton.

That the polyglot, smoky settlement sprawling on both sides of an
historic river should be a part of his native New England seemed at times
to be a hideous dream; nor could he comprehend what had happened to him,
and to the world of order and standards and religious sanctions into
which he had been born. His had been a life of relinquishments. For a
long time he had clung to the institution he had been taught to believe
was the rock of ages, the Congregational Church, finally to abandon it;
even that assuming a form fantastic and unreal, as embodied in the
edifice three blocks distant from Fillmore Street which he had attended
for a brief time, some ten years before, after his arrival in Hampton.
The building, indeed, was symbolic of a decadent and bewildered
Puritanism in its pathetic attempt to keep abreast with the age, to
compromise with anarchy, merely achieving a nondescript medley of
rounded, knob-like towers covered with mulberry-stained shingles. And the
minister was sensational and dramatic. He looked like an actor, he
aroused in Edward Bumpus an inherent prejudice that condem