MARIA and Aunt Gerty, carrying respectability to the verge of fashion, led the way by the path across the green to the village church. Josiah, walking with his daughters, followed ten paces behind. Wearing the tall hat of public life he looked imposing, but four and a quarter years of war had chastened him. The roll and the swagger were not what they were; four and a quarter years of incessant but fruitful labor for the common weal had molded his mind, had modified an aggressive personality.

The church, although in excess of the local requirements as a rule, was very full this morning in November. It was an hour of Thanksgiving. The goal had been reached. Victory, complete and final, had come almost like a thief in the night. And its coming had revealed, in a manner transcending even the awful dramas of old, the omnipotence of the moral law. Yet again the God of Righteousness had declared Himself in Sovereign power.

Grim perils had been surmounted by the devotion of the sons and daughters of the race, but very much remained to do. Behind the humble gratitude to the Giver of Victory, behind the sense of exultation so rightly uppermost this Sabbath morning, was in every heart a desolating sense of the cost in human lives and a deep anxiety for the future.

The Vicar of the parish, by name the Reverend Corfield Stanning, was a white-haired man who had given soul and kin freely to the Cause. He was a son of the soil, a type of the almost extinct squarson who survives here and there in England, half landowner, half patriarch, less a scholar than a sportsman and a man of the world. For that reason, perhaps, he had the practical wisdom that books do not give. He had the instinct for affairs which men of his type seldom lack.

Victory was with the arms of Right. The people did well to rejoice. But also it was a time for prayer, for steadfast dedication to the gigantic tasks ahead. The man-eating tiger was in the net. It now remained to repair the havoc he had wrought, and to provide security for generations unborn against his kind.

Having humbly thanked the Giver, the old man prayed for his country and for those noble races of which it was the foster-mother. He prayed for all her wide-flung peoples to whom the Keys had been given; he prayed that the Pioneers of sacred liberties so long in peril, those one in name and in blood over all the wide seas, who hold Milton’s faith, who speak Shakespeare’s tongue may ever stand as now, shoulder to shoulder in the gate.

He prayed for all those children of men grown old and weak in bondage, whose chains had at last been cast off. He besought the Divine grace to guide them.

Finally, he prayed for the Co-trustees of the future and that the Divine wisdom encompass them in their reckoning with a cruel and unworthy foe. He asked that mercy be extended to those who had denied it to others, not that it was in his heart to pity them in their eclipse or to spare them aught of their desert, but that the name of the Master be served, in whom lay the ultimate hope of the world, might be honored in mankind’s supreme yet most terrible hour.

When the old man came to his brief and simple sermon the words of his text pierced every heart. “Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.”

It began with commemoration of a humble hero, known to many in that church, who had given all he had to give without stint or question. And he read a letter written from the sacred and recovered soil of France by the officer commanding that Band of Brothers raised in their midst to the wife of one Sergeant William Hollis, who had died a soldier and a gentleman that his faith and his friends might live.

THE END

Transcriber’s Notes:

Minor changes have been made to correct obvious typesetters’ errors and to regularize hyphenation; variant spellings have been retained.

In chapter XXIV, page 146, the sentence that was typeset as “By the time William and Melia turned down Saint James his street,” has been changed to “By the time William and Melia turned down Saint James’s street,” to make sense grammatically.

In several places, Josiah Munt refers to himself or others as “prattical” in conversation. In chapter XXXVI, page 241, he is musing about education for women as not being “prattical”; the Transcriber has chosen to retain this spelling as fitting the author's style and intent.

In four instances in the book, the author refers to a “pickelet”, and in one place to a “pikelet”. Because of the frequency of pickelet, the Transcriber has chosen to retain the variant spelling.