After Twenty Years and Other Stories Author:Julian Sturgis General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1892 Original Publisher: Longmans, Green, and Co. Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com wher... more »e you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: AN UNIMPOKTANT PERSON. Clodthorpe is a town of Rip Van Winkles. If one of them were to go away into a cleft of the swelling hills, and come back no more, there would be but one pipe less by the inn fire. If he returned after some twenty years, there would be but one pipe more. Of course this is not true. The town is not very far from London, and the railway passes within four miles. But when you look down on Clodthorpe from some neighbouring hill, or catch a glimpse of it from the Thames, it seems so sleepy that it can hardly puff away its own blue smoke, so sleepy that you yawn pleasantly as you gaze, so sleepy that Sleep himself girdled and crowned with poppies might be sleeping there. Go into the town at noon, and, lo ! it is a bustling place, and a growing. It has been growing for ages with the growth of the English people, When a Plantagenet wanted a bowman, he sent to Clodthorpe. Had a Tudor wanted another playwright, he might have dug up a Shakespeare hereabout. One townsman of this goodly place would drink you three of Boreham or six of Blockley through happiness into oblivion. Of late it has grown more quickly, creeping along the country roads, rooting up hedges and pushing down elms, and so has come to Colthurst farm, and swallowed it. The meadows of deep grass, which stretch to the river-bank, are still country; but the barn is a school under clerical control; the yard, once full of straw and the smell of kine, has been swept and gravelled into a playground; and the farm-house, which stands at right angles to the barn, and likewise opens into the...« less